ie re ee 
TIS KPT I 
AS st ef 


Ete 
y oy. 
Peery 
pe 
+7 # , ; Uy ¥ PFS FP. 
RP eee Oe ve eee "Sele ey eye eee ee , y IK . ? eee Fe FP 
Pe ee Be vy eee : te ee ewe te 6a ee eee ee 
eho ee oF 


ee Poy, 
cs Fs ‘ FF VIF PITH yr , t ’ 4 . 
et A a ee hr A ABR 9 ’ er a 
TTY YF > FY FO 
Se ee ee eee 
ee ee ee ee ee ee ee , oe 
ee ee Ae G Uy ¢ oe CARAS? en As 
a ee eee ve ve + oF rP9Y tad x 
4 este IF FFP. 
ee ee ; * <a +9 9% wee < » 
we ewe ‘ ++ TONE EE PEE ST FOF PS FF 
aie : eae ee toe oF 
’ 


oF +? Lande « 4 LSS _- 

+ > 5 e Wy ‘ é. 
SAS A 
= Reece 
4 eA Se 

Cc é Ce 
"t 799. 2 TF b ne iA FF. bat 
FFF EFI FT ADF LZ +S 


¥ 
A 

SPH FF SF 
Ce Ae 
J ’ 
gnc f 

5 t 

+4, aes + 
* Pe eek 2 4 C) 
III F FIFI Fe - we 
FFF, Fy, VIF. cho 


#.9.>. 

FS 
he 
SAD 
FFF. 


Ce ne 
ee i 
ee 


yey $A; 
POOCCLE: 


(ae 
SAG use 


0 
ne 


= ks ‘ 
+23 FPF FF * x CR RD 
See ? Or SPE Ses Cie - ¥,F, 2. 

4 wb ae ee * * SAS, 

ver SC eee ee 

eee . 

+ + 


ee 
‘a 
Tey, 


eRe 
Dmen 


AK ~ 
FIP FVII 
eee ee 


Pare : 
CRN AOS 


eee 
Pere 


+*# 


7 


Ww 


rt oe ss 
ah ee hee 
Ce oe 


. 
+5 > ; : De 
a ke = AS AS 
28 Se = Say Se 


# OH ? es SCR 
cer. 7? J ae *. =. 
eer ars Ia oe bee ee ee Sewers Shee he ; ne ee ee 
Ce a Ane ae eV ee . > * & pw * = 9 SO HD 
4 Vira yy ee ee 
(HAAR RE ys Hb See 


* ¥ at * * Ce * < € * ay bar 
Cee oe & * E 4 4 i 
3 : C + ee > suse ee te c ee LOCKS * 


ea a 
test” 
ene tke 


CCMA 
+ 20.3 he 
aaah atel ae oe be > 
Veta yes aes : 
are ee ee ne > ets & 
1 ee ee eee “ _ "4 Oe 
wees abt eae a ee Ok oe eb ee 
wee ete nee ; 2 eee Pe * 

she a4 As 


’ E 

a8 * 

Pe ee ee 

ere cea gb ee 
spre 
a 


Cee 
 o 


CS 


ee ~ 


= > 
ee, = — 
See Beak RCS ! see a 
G P oo . 
,? eet A oe 


moe. 
hae 2 eRe 
ned, 
ua tay ety ate 
‘ 


ee at . 
aiate See . 
z ® 
veers eek he ys 
ee ee 
4 a a ee Oe © 
whe Ak ek eye as 
‘es eh & wh a 














From¥ohe Evorary of 
Dr. R. E. Hieronymus 
1942 


314 
EmS3r 
(S9Ss 











| The person charging this material is re- 
sponsible for its return to the library from 
which it was withdrawn on or before the 
Latest Date stamped below. 
Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons 
for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from 


the University. 
To renew call Telephone Center, 333-8400 


UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN 





L161—O-1096 











Parts il an, we iy 
x ware Si —— on in) » 
ated tab>-er"s lel ew gee rane 


a a (ous) q 4 
* 


7 


te ar) . Ba 


7 4 
er 
nad Gis. 
ees) . 
a 





By Ralph Waldo Emerson. 


COMPLETE WORKS. Riverside Edition. With 2 Por- 
traits, and papers hitherto unpublished. 11 vols., each, 
12mo, gilt top, $1.75; the set, $19.25. ‘ 

1. Nature, Addresses, and Lectures (formerly known 
as Miscellanies). 2. Essays. First Series. 3. Essays. 
Second Series. 4. Representative Men. 5. English 
Traits. 6. Conduct of Life. 7. Society and Solitude. 
8. Letters and Social Aims. 9. Poems 1o. Lectures and 
Biographical Sketches. 11. Miscellanies. 

New Little Classic Edition. 11 vols., in arrangement and 
contents identical with above. Each, 18mo, $1.25; the 
set, $13.75. 

POEMS. AHousehold Edition. With Portrait. 12mo, 
$1.50; full gilt, $2.00. 

ESSAYS. First and Second Series. Mew Authorized 
Popular Edition, complete. 12mo0, $1.00; paper, 50 
cents. 

NATURE, LECTURES, AND ADDRESSES; together 
with REPRESENTATIVE MEN. Popular Edition. 
Crown 8vo, $1.00. 

PARNASSUS. A collection of Poetry edited by Mr. Em- 
erson. With Introductory Essay. Mousehold Edition. 
12m0, $1.50. 

Library Edition. 8vo, $3.00. © 

EMERSON BIRTHDAY BOOK. With Portrait and Illus- 
trations. 24mo, $1.00. 

EMERSON CALENDAR BOOK. 32mo, parchment-paper, 
25 cents. 

CULTURE, BEHAVIOR, BEAUTY, POWER, WEALTH, 
Illusions, Books, Art, Eloquence. Modern Classics, No. 
2. 32mo, 75 cents. School Edition, 40 cents. 

NATURE, SUCCESS, GREATNESS, IMMORTALITY, 
Love, Friendship, Domestic Life. Modern Classics, No. 
3- 32mo0, 75 cents. School Edition, 40 cents. 

FORTUNE OF THE REPUBLIC and other American Es- 
says. Riverside Literature Series, No. 42. 16mo, paper, 
15 cents. 


HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY, 


Boston AND New York. 





ae | 
(We, E Sherarveg vised 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN 
NATURE, ADDRESSES. AND 


wy 


PECEU-RES : 
U Oerref~eadt 


a 


Dg /ttd, BY ae 
RALPH WALDO EMERSON tH . 


TWO VOLUMES IN ONE 
POPULAR EDITION 


n 


Nbten 


— 
——, 
=, 
SS 
=, 
al, 
4: 


woe 
cc) 


5 
(EIGAD Se 
Nh ard FN. 


ial 





iS 
at 
We 





BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
Che Riverside ress, Cambridge 


Copyright, 1855 and 1876, 
By PHILLIPS, SAMPSON & CO. anp RALPH WALDO EMERSON. 


Copyright, 1883, 
By EDWARD W. EMERSON. 


All rights reserved. 


The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 


REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


- SEVEN LECTURES. 


at 





tee ts 1 4 


FF 
ce 


PIMA By se Sat 


a4 


} 


a) 7 ine he ous > 
hab th a ae Sos agen fat Te 


aves. 


« 
eo 


Certegy oS 





CONTENTS. 


— 
PAGE 
I. Uses or Great MEN u ; é ‘ : 7 
II. ‘Prato; oR, THE PHILOSOPHER . 5 * : 39 
— Prato: New Reapines . 5 ° es . as 
VII. Swepenpore ; or, THe Mystic . é é : 89 
“Le Mowrarens ; or, THE SKEPTIC , ‘ A ules 
V. SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET ; ‘ : ‘ 179 
VI.-Naroreon; or, Tur Man or tHe Wortp .. 211 


‘Vie. Goetne: OR; Toe WRITER . 9.) 4 62). 247 


’ 


a ae, 
. 


rs . PPG a! wr a 2.2 : 
r an 
Hee 


a Ne ° 





aay 





BRE Ci ake Gee 
Mier ne? Xe Bay 
ie, tie ae 


J 


A HE ERA. AOe, ote OF se 


1 





; 


I. 
USES OF GREAT MEN. 





IT is natural to believe in great men. If the 
companions of our childhood should turn out to be 
heroes, and their condition regal, it would not sur- 
prise us. All mythology opens with demigods, and 
the circumstance is high and poetic; that is, their 
genius is paramount. In the legends of the Gau- 
tama, the first men ate the earth and found it deli- 
clously sweet. 

Nature seems to exist for the excellent. The 
world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they 
make the earth wholesome. They who lived with 
them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet 
and tolerable only in our belief in such society ; 
and, actually or ideally, we manage to live with 
superiors. We call our children and our lands by 
their names. Their names are wrought into the 
verbs of language, their works and effigies are in 
our houses, and every circumstance of the day re- 
calls an anecdote of them. 

The search after the great man is the dream of 


10 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


youth and the most serious occupation of manhood. 
We travel into foreign parts to find his works, — 
if possible, to get a glimpse of him. But we are 
put off with fortune instead. You say, the Eng- 
lish are practical; the Germans are hospitable ; in 
Valencia the climate is delicious ; and in the hills 
of the Sacramento there is gold for the gathering. 
Yes, but Ido not travel to find comfortable, rich 
and hospitable people, or clear sky, or ingots that 
cost too much. But if there were any magnet that 
would point to the countries and houses where are 
the persons who are intrinsically rich and power- 
ful, I would sell all and buy it, and put myself on 
the road to-day. 
, The race goes with us on their credit. The 
)knowledge that in the city is a man who invented 
‘the railroad, raises the credit of all the citizens. 
‘But enormous populations, if they be beggars, are 
disgusting, like moving cheese, like hills of ants or 
‘of fleas, — the more, the worse. 

Our religion is the love and cherishing of these 
patrons. The gods of fable are the shining mo- 
ments of great men. Werun all our vessels into 
one mould. Our colossal theologies of Judaism, 
Christism, Buddhism, Mahometism, are the neces- 
sary and structural action of the human mind. 
The student of history is like a man going into a 
warehouse to buy cloths or carpets. He fancies he 


USES OF GREAT MEN. ime 


has a new article. If he go to the factory, he shall 
find that his new stuff still repeats the scrolls and 
rosettes which are found on the interior walls of 
the pyramids of Thebes. Our theism is the purifi- 
cation of the human mind. Man can paint, or 
make, or think, nothing but man. He believes 
that the great material elements had their origin 
from his thought. And our philosophy finds one 
essence collected or distributed. 


If now we proceed to inquire into the kinds of 
service we derive from others, let us be warned of 
the danger of modern studies, and begin low 
enough. We must not contend against love, or 
deny the substantial existence of other people. I 
know not what would happen to us. We have so- 
cial strengths. Our affection towards others cre- 
ates a sort of vantage or purchase which nothing 
will supply. I can do that by another which I can- 
not do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first 
say to myself. _ Other men are lenses through 
which we read our own minds.{j Each man seeks 
those of different quality from his own, and such 
as are good of their kind; that is, he seeks other 
men, and the otherest. The stronger the nature, | 
the more it is reactive. Let us have the quality 
pure. A little genius let us leave alone. (A main 
difference betwixt men is, whether they attend their 


13 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


own. affair or not. | ‘Man is that noble endogenous 
) plant which grows, like the palm, from within out- 
ward. 7 His own affair, though impossible to others, 
ae can open with celerity and in sport. It is easy 
to sugar to be sweet and to nitre to be salt. We 
take a great deal of pains to waylay and entrap 
that which of itself will fall into our hands. {1 
count him a great man who inhabits a higher 
\sphere of thought, into which other men rise with 
jlabor and difficulty ; he has but to open his eyes to 
dsee things in a true light and in large relations, 
whilst they must make painful corrections and 
keep a vigilant eye on many sources of error. His 
service to us is of like sort. It costs a beautiful 
person no exertion to paint her image on our eyes ; 
yet how splendid is that benefit! It costs no more 
for a wise soul to convey his quality to other men. 
And every one can do his best thing easiest. ‘Pew 
de moyens, beaucoup d’effét.” He is great who 
is what he is from nature, and who never reminds 
us of others. 

But he must be related to us,and our life receive 
from him some promise of explanation. I cannot 
tell what I would know ; but I have observed there 

/ are persons who, in their character and actions, an- 
_swer questions which I have not skill to put. One 
_man answers some question which none of his con- 
| temporaries put, and is isolated. The past and 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 13 


passing religions and philosophies answer some 

other question. Certain men affect us as rich pos- 

sibilities, but helpless to themselves and to their 

times, — the sport perhaps of some instinct that 

rules in the air ;— they do not speak to our want. 

But the great are near; we know them at sight. 

They satisfy expectation and fall into place. What 

is good is effective, generative; makes for itself 

room, food and allies. A sound apple produces 

seed, —a hybrid does not. Is a man in his place, 

he is constructive, fertile, magnetic, inundating ar- 

mies with his purpose, which is thus executed. 

The river makes its own shores, and each legiti- 

mate idea makes its own channels and welcome, — 
harvests for food, institutions for expression, weap- 

ons to fight with and disciples to explain it: The ? 
true artist has the planet for his pedestal; the ad- ) 
venturer, after years of strife, has nothing broader — 
than his own shoes. : 

Our common discourse respects two kinds of 
use or service from superior men. Direct giving 
is agreeable to the early belief of men; direct 
giving of material or metaphysical aid, as of health, 
eternal youth, fine senses, arts of healing, magical 
power and prophecy. The boy believes there is 
a teacher who can sell him wisdom. Churches 
believe in imputed merit. But, in strictness, we 
are not much cognizant of direct serving. Man is 


14 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


| endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The 
aid we have from others is mechanical compared 
_ with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus 
learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect 
remains. Right ethics are central and go from the 
soul outward. Gift is contrary to the law of the 
universe. Serving others is serving us. I must 
absolve me to myself. ‘ Mind thy affair,’ says the 
spirit: —‘coxcomb, would you meddle with the 
skies, or with other people?’ Indirect service is 
left. Men have a pictorial or representative quality, 
and serve us in the intellect. Behmen and Sweden- 
borg saw that things were representative. Men 
_are also representative; first, of things, and sec- 
ondly, of ideas. 

As plants convert the minerals into food for 
animals, so each man converts some raw material 
in nature to human use.. The inventors of fire, 
electricity, magnetism, iron, lead, glass, linen, silk, 
cotton ; the makers of tools; the inventor of deci- 
mal notation; the geometer; the engineer; the 
musician, — severally make an easy way for all, 
through unknown and impossible confusions. Each 
man is by secret liking connected with some district 
of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is; as 
Linneus, of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries, of 
lichens; Van Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic 
forms ; Euclid, of lines; Newton, of fluxions, 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 15 


A man is acentre for nature, running out threads 
of relation through every thing, fluid and _ solid, 
material and elemental. The earth rolls; every 
clod and stone comes to the meridian: so every 
organ, function, acid, crystal, grain of dust, has its 
relation to the brain. It waits long, but its turn 
comes. Hach plant has its parasite, and each cre- 
ated thing its lover and poet. Justice has already 
been done to steam, to iron, to wood, to coal, to 
loadstone, to iodine, to corn and cotton; but how 
few materials are yet used by our arts! The mass 
of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expec- 
tant. It would seem as if each waited, like the 
enchanted princess in fairy tales, for a destined 
human deliverer. Each must be disenchanted and 
walk forth to the day in human shape. In the 
history of discovery, the ripe and latent truth seems 
to have fashioned a brain, for itself. A magnet 
must be made man in some Gilbert, or Swedenborg, 
or Oersted, before the general mind can come to 
entertain its powers. 

If we limit ourselves to the first advantages, 
a sober grace adheres to the mineral and botanic 
kingdoms, which, in the highest moments, comes 
up as the charm of nature,—the glitter of the 
spar, the sureness of affinity, the veracity of angles. 
Light and darkness, heat and cold, hunger and 
food, sweet and sour, solid, liquid and gas, circle 


| 


16 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


us round in a wreath of pleasures, and, by their 
agreeable quarrel, beguile the day of life. The 
eye repeats every day the first eulogy on things, — 
“‘ He saw that they were good.” We know where 
to find them ; and these performers are relished all 
the more, after a little experience of the pretending 
races. We are entitled also to higher advantages. 
Something is wanting to science until it has been 
humanized. The table of logarithms is one thing, 
and its vital play in botany, music, optics and archi- 
tecture, another. There are advancements to num- 
bers, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, little sus- 
pected at first, when, by union with intellect and 
will, they ascend into the -life and reappear in 
conversation, character and politics. 

But this comes later. _ We speak now only of 
our acquaintance with them in their own sphere 
and the way in which they seem to fascinate and 
draw to them some genius who occupies himself 
with one thing, all his life long. The possibility 
of interpretation lies in the identity of the observer 
with the observed. Each material thing has its 
celestial side ; has its translation, through humanity, 
into the spiritual and necessary sphere where it 
plays a part as indestructible as any other. And 
to these, their ends, all things continually ascend. 


The gases gather to the solid firmament: the 
_chemic lump arrives at the plant, and grows; 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 17 


arrives at the quadruped, and walks; arrives at \ 
‘the man, and thinks. But also the constituency 
determines the vote of the representative. He is 
not only representative, but participant. Like can 
only be known by like. The reason why he knows 
about them is that he is of them; he has just come 
out of nature, or from being a part of that thing. 
Animated chlorine knows of chlorine, and incarnate } 
zine, of zinc. Their quality makes his career ; and 
he can variously publish their virtues, because they’ 
compose him. Man, made of the dust of the world, 
does not forget his origin ; and all that is yet inan- 
imate will one day speak and reason. Unpublished | 
nature will have its whole secret told. Shall we 
say that quartz mountains will pulverize into innu- 
merable Werners, Von Buchs and Beaumonts, and 
the laboratory of the atmosphere holds in solution 
I know not what Berzeliuses and Davys ? 

Thus we sit by the fire and take hold on the 
poles of the earth. This quasi omnipresence sup- 
plies the imbecility of our condition. In one of 
those celestial days when heaven and earth meet 
and adorn each other, it seems a poverty that we 
can only spend it once: we wish for a thousand 
heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate 
its immense beauty in many ways and places. Is 
this fancy? Well, in good faith, we are multiplied 


by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors! 
VOL. Iv. 2 


18 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Every ship that comes to America got its chart 
from Columbus. Every novel is a debtor to Ho- | 
mer. Every carpenter who shaves with a fore- 
plane borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. 
Life is girt all round with a zodiac of sciences, the 
contributions of men who have perished to add 
their point of light to our sky. Engineer, broker, 
jurist, physician, moralist, theologian, and every 
man, inasmuch as he has any science, — is a definer 
and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes of 
our condition. These road-makers on every hand 
enrich us. We must extend the.area of life and 
multiply our relations. We are as much gainers 
by finding a new property in the old earth as by 
acquiring a new planet. 

We are too passive in the reception of these ma- 
terial or semi-material aids. We must not be sacks 
and stomachs. ‘To ascend one step, — we are bet- 
ter served through our sympathy. Activity is con- 
tagious. Looking where others look, and convers- 
ing with the same things, we catch the charm which 
lured them. Napoleon said, ‘ You must not fight 
(too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all 
‘your art of war.” ‘Talk much with any man of 
vigorous mind, and we acquire very fast the habit 
of looking at things in the same light, and on each 
occurrence we anticipate his thought. 

Men are helpful through the intellect and the 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 19 


affections. Other help I find a false appearance. 
If you affect to give me bread and fire, I perceive 
that I pay for it the full price, and at last it leaves 
me as it found me, neither better nor worse: but 
all mental and moral force is a positive good. It 
goes out from you, whether you will or not, and 
profits me whom you never thought of. I cannot 
even hear of personal vigor of any kind, great 
power of performance, without fresh resolution. 
We are emulous of all that man can do. Cecil’s 
saying of Sir Walter Raleigh, “I know that he 
ean toil terribly,” is an electric touch. So are 
Clarendon’s portraits, — of Hampden, “ who was 
of an industry and vigilance not to be tired out or 
wearied by the most laborious, and of parts not to 
be imposed on by the most subtle and sharp,-and 
of a personal courage equal to his best parts ;” — 
of Falkland, “who was so severe an adorer of 
truth, that he could as easily have given himself 
leave to steal, as to dissemble.” We cannot read 
Plutarch without a tingling of the blood; and I 
accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius: “ A sage 
is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the 
manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid become in- 
telligent, and the wavering, determined.” 

This is the moral of biography; yet it is hard 
for departed men to touch the quick like our own 
companions, whose names mar not last as long. 


20 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 
What is he whom I never think of? Whilst in 


every solitude are those who succor our genius and 
stimulate us in wonderful manners. There is a 
power in love to divine another’s destiny better 
than that other can, and, by heroic encouragements, 
hold him to his task. What has friendship so sig- 
nal as its sublime attraction to whatever virtue is 
inus? We will never more think cheaply of our- 
selves, or of life. We are piqued to some purpose, 
and the industry of the diggers on the railroad will 
not again shame us. 

Under this head too falls that homage, very pure 
as I think, which all ranks pay to the hero of the 
day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus down to Pitt, 
Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear 
the shouts in the street! The people cannot see him 
enough. ‘They delight in a man. Here is a head 
and a trunk! What a front! what eyes! Atlan- 
tean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with 
equal inward force to guide the great machine! 
This pleasure of full expression to that which, in 
their private experience is usually cramped and 
obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the se- 
eret of the reader’s joy in literary genius. Nothing 
is kept back. There is fire enough to fuse the 
mountain of ore. Shakspeare’s principal merit 
/ may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best 
\ understands the English language, and can say 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 21 


what he will. Yet these unchoked channels and ) 
floodgates of expression are only health or fortu- 
nate constitution. Shakspeare’s name suggests 
other and purely intellectual benefits. 

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with 
their medals, swords and armorial coats, like the 
addressing to a human being thoughts out of a 
certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. 
This honor, which is possible in personal intercourse 
scarcely twice in a lifetime, genius perpetually 
pays; contented if now and then in a century the 
proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of 
matter are degraded to a sort of cooks and con- 
fectioners, on the appearance of the indicators of 
ideas. Genius is the naturalist or geographer of 
the supersensible regions, and draws their map ; 
and, by acquainting us with new fields of activity, 
cools our affection for the old. These are at once 
accepted as the reality, of which the world we have 
conversed with is the show. 

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming: 
school to see the power and beauty of the body; 
there is the like pleasure and a higher benefit from 
witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as feats 
of memory, of mathematical combination, great 
power of abstraction, the transmutings of the imag- 
ination, even versatility and concentration, — as 
these acts expose the invisible organs an] members 


22 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


of the mind, which respond, member for member, 
to the parts of the body. For we thus enter a new 
gymnasium, and learn to choose men by their truest 
marks, taught, with Plato, “to choose those who 
can, without aid from the eyes or any other sense, 
proceed to truth and to being.” Foremost among 
these activities are the summersaults, spells and 
resurrections wrought by the imagination. When 
this wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or 
a thousand times his force. It opens the delicious 
sense of indeterminate size and inspires an auda- 
cious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas 
_of gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word 
' dropped in conversation, sets free our fancy, and 
instantly our heads are bathed with galaxies, and 
our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And this bene- 
fit is real because we are entitled to these enlarge- 
ments, and once having passed the bounds shall 
never again be quite the miserable pedants we were. 

The high functions of the intellect are so allied 
that some imaginative power usually appears in 
all eminent minds, even in arithmeticians of the 
first class, but especially in. meditative men of an 
intuitive habit of thought. This class serve us, so 
that they have the perception of identity and the 
perception of reaction. The eyes of Plato, Shak- 
speare, Swedenborg, Goethe, never shut on either 
of these laws. The perception of these laws is a 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 20 


kind of metre of the mind. Little minds are little / 
through failure to see them. 

Even these feasts have their surfeit. Our de- 
light im reason degenerates into idolatry of the 
herald. “Especially when a mind of powerful 
method has instructed men, we find the examples 
of oppression. The dominion of Aristotle, the 
Ptolemaic astronomy, the credit of Luther, of Ba- 
con, of Locke ;— Jin religion the history of hie- 
rarchies, of saints, and the sects which have taken 
the name of each founder, are in point. Alas! 
every man is such a victim. The imbecility of men 
is always inviting the impudence of power. It is 
the delight of vulgar talent to dazzle and to blind 
the beholder. But true genius seeks to defend us 
- from itself. True genius will not impoverish, but 
will liberate, and add new senses. If a wise man 
should appear in our village he would create, in | 
those who conversed with him, a new consciousness 
of wealth, by opening their eyes to unobserved ad- ° 
vantages; he would establish a sense of immovable 
equality, calm us with assurances that we could not 
be cheated ; as every one would discern the checks 
and guaranties of condition. The rich would see 
their mistakes and poverty, the poor their escapes 
and their resources. 

But nature brings all this about in due time. 
Rotation is her remedy. The soul is impatient of 


24 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


masters and eager for change. Housekeepers say 
of a domestic who has been valuable, ‘“‘ She had 
lived with me long enough.” We are tendencies, 
Sor rather, symptoms, and none of us complete. We 
touch and go, and sip the foam of many lives. Ro- 
tation is the law of nature. When nature removes 
a great man, people explore the horizon for a suc- 
cessor; but none comes, and none will. His class 
is extinguished with him. In some other and quite 
different field the next man will appear; not Jef- 
ferson, not Franklin, but now a great salesman, 
then a road-contractor, then a student of fishes, 
then a buffalo-hunting explorer, or a semi-savage 
Western general. Thus we make a stand against 
our rougher masters ; but against the best there is 
a finer remedy. ‘The power which they communi- 
| _3eate is not theirs. When we are exalted by ideas, 
| we do not owe this to Plato, but to the_idea, to 
‘which also Plato was debtor. 

I must not forget that we have a special debt 
to a single class. Life is a scale of degrees. 
Between rank and rank of our great men are 
wide intervals. Mankind have in all ages attached 
themselves to a few persons who either by the 
quality of that idea they embodied or by the large- 
ness of their reception were entitled to the posi- 
tion of leaders and law-givers. These teach us the 
qualities of primary nature, — admit us to the con 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 95 


stitution of things. We swim, day by day, on a 
river of delusions and are effectually amused with 
houses and towns in the air, of which the men 
about us are dupes. But life is a sincerity. In 
lucid intervals we say, ‘ Let there be an entrance 
opened for me into realities; I have worn the fool’s 
cap too long.’ We will know the meaning of our 
economies and politics. Give us the cipher, and 
if persons and things are scores of a celestial music, 
let us read off the strains. We have been cheated 
of our reason; yet there have been sane men, who 
enjoyed a rich and related existence. What they 
know, they know for us. With each new mind, 
a new secret of nature transpires; nor can the 
Bible be closed. until the last great man is born. 
These men correct the delirium of the animal 
spirits, make us considerate and engage us to 
new aims and powers. ‘The veneration of man- 
kind selects these for the highest place. Witness 
the multitude of statues, pictures and memorials 
which recall their genius in every city, village, 
house and ship: — 
“ Ever their phantoms arise before us, 
- Our loftier brothers, but one in blood; 
At bed and table they lord it o’er us 
With looks of beauty and words of good.” 


How to illustrate the distinctive benefit of ideas, 
the service rendered by those who introduce moral 


26 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


truths into the general mind ?— I am _ plagued, 
in all my living, with a perpetual tariff of prices. 
If I work in my garden and prune an apple-tree, 
I am well enough entertained, and could continue 
indefinitely in the like occupation. But it comes 
us mind that a day is gone, and I have got this 
{precious nothing done. I go to Boston or New 
York and run up and down on my affairs: they 
are sped, but so is the day. I am vexed by the 
recollection of this price I have paid for a trifling 
advantage. J remember the peau d’dne on which 
whoso sat should have his desire, but a piece of 
the skin was gone for every wish. I go to a con- 
vention of philanthropists. Do what I can, I 
cannot keep my eyes off the clock. Butif there 
should appear in the company some gentle soul 
who knows little of persons or parties, of Caro- 
lina or Cuba, but who announces a law that dis- 
poses these particulars, and so certifies me of 
the equity which checkmates every false player, 
bankrupts every self-seeker, and apprises me of 
my independence on any conditions of country, 
or time, or human body, —that man liberates me ; 
I forget the clock. I pass out of the sore relation 
to persons. I am healed of my hurts. I am 
made immortal by apprehending my possession 
of incorruptible goods. Here is great competition 
of rich and poor. We live in a market, where 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 27 


is only so much wheat, or wool, or land: and if 
I have so much more, every other must have so 
much less. I seem to have no good without 
breach of good manners. Nobody is glad in the 
gladness of another, and our system is one of 
war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of 
the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It 
is our system; and a man comes to measure his 
greatness by the regrets, envies and hatreds of his 
competitors. But in these new fields there is room: 
here are no self-esteems, no exclusions. 

IT admire great men of all classes, those who 
stand for facts, and for thoughts; I like rough and 
smooth, “‘Scourges of God,” and “ Darlings of the 
human race.” I like the first Cresar; and Charles , 
V., of Spain; and Charles XII., of Sweden; Rich- ) 
ard Plantagenet; and Bonaparte, in France. I 
applaud a sufficient man, an officer equal to his 
office ; captains, ministers, senators. I like a master 
standing firm on legs of iron, well-born, rich, hand- 
some, eloquent, loaded with advantages, drawing all 
men by fascination into tributaries and supporters 
of his power. Sword and staff, or talents sword- 
like or staff-like, carry on the work of the world. 
But I find him greater when he can abolish himself 
and all heroes, by letting in this element of reason, 
irrespective of persons, this subtilizer and irresist- 
ible upward force, into our thought, destroying in- 


28 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


dividualism ; the power so great that the potentate 
is nothing. Then he is a monarch who gives a con- 
stitution to his people; a pontiff who preaches the 
equality of souls and releases his servants from 
their barbarous homages; an emperor who can 
spare his empire. 


But I intended to specify, with a little minute. 
ness, two or three points of service. Nature never 
spares the opium or nepenthe, but wherever she 
mars her creature with some deformity or defect, 
lays her poppies plentifully on the bruise, andthe 
sufferer goes joyfully through life, ignorant of the 
ruin and incapable of seeing it, though all the 
world point their finger at it every day. The 
worthless and offensive members of society, whose 
existence is a social pest, invariably think them- 
selves the most ill-used people alive, and never get 
over their astonishment at the ingratitude and 
selfishness of their contemporaries. Our globe 
discovers its hidden virtues, not only in heroes and 
archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not 
a rare contrivance that lodged the due inertia in 
every creature, the conserving, resisting energy, 
the anger at being waked or changed? Altogether 
independent of the intellectual force in each is the 
pride of opinion, the security that we are right. 
Not the feeblest grandame, not a mowing idiot, 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 29 


but uses what spark of perception and faculty is 
left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion 
over the absurdities of all the rest. Difference 
from me is the measure of absurdity. Not one 
has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a 
bright thought that made things eohere with this 
bitumen, fastest of cements? But, in the midst 
of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure 
goes by which Thersites too can love and admire. 
This is he that should marshall us the way we 
were going. There is no end to his aid. With- 
out Plato we should almost lose our faith in the 
possibility of a reasonable book. We seem to 
want but one, but we want one. We love to 
associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity 
is unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts 
and manners easily become great. ‘We are all 
wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There 
needs but one wise man in a company and all are 
wise, so rapid is the contagion. | 

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes 
from egotism and enable us to see other people and 
their works. But there are vices and follies inci- 
dent to whole populations and ages. Men resem- 
ble their contemporaries even more than their pro- 
genitors. It is observed in old couples, or in per-. 
sons who have been housemates for a course of 


years, that they grow like, and if they should live’ 


30 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


long enough we should not be able to know them 
apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which 
threaten to melt the world into a lump, and has- 
tens to break up such maudlin agglutinations. The 
like assimilation goes on between men of one town, 
of one sect, of one political party ; and the ideas of 
the time are in the air, and infect all who breathe 
it. Viewed from any high point, this city of New 
York, yonder city of London, the Western civiliza- 
tion, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep 
each other in countenance and exasperate by emu- 
lation the frenzy of the time. The shield against 
the stinging of conscience is the universal practice, 
or our contemporaries. Again, it is very easy to 
be as wise and good as your companions. We 
learn of our contemporaries what they know, with- 
out effort, and almost through the pores of the 
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife ar- 
rives at the intellectual and moral elevations of her 
husbanc. But we stop where they stop. Very 
hardly can we take another step. The great, or 
such as hold of nature and transcend fashions by 
their fidelity to universal ideas, are saviors from 
these federal errors, and defend us from our con- 
temporaries. They are the exceptions which we 
want, where all grows like. A foreign greatness is 
the antidote for cabalism. 

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 81 


from too much conversation with our mates, and ex- 
ult in the depth of nature in that direction in which 
he leads us. What indemnification is one great 
man for populations of pigmies! Every mother 
wishes one son a genius, though all the rest should 
be mediocre. But a new danger appears in the ex- 
cess of influence of the great man. His attractions 
warp us from our place. We have become under- 
lings and intellectual suicides. Ah! yonder in the 
horizon is our help ;-— other great men, new quali- 
ties, counterweights and checks on each other. We 
cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness. Ev- 
ery hero becomes a bore at last. Perhaps Voltaire 
was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus, 
even, “I pray you, let me never hear that man’s 
name again.” They cry up the virtues of George 
Washington, — “ Damn George Washington!” is 
the poor Jacobin’s whole speech and confutation. 
But it is human nature’s indispensable defence. 

‘The centripetence augments the centrifugence. \ 

“We balance one man with his opposite, and the 
health of the state depends on the see-saw. 

There is however a speedy limit to the use of 
heroes. Every genius is defended from approach 
by quantities of unavailableness. They are very 
attractive, and seem at a distance our own: but we 
are hindered on all sides from approach. The 
more we are drawn, the more we are repelled. 


32 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


There is something not solid in the good that is 
done for us. The best discovery the discoverer 
makes for himself. It has something unreal for 
his companion until he too has substantiated it. 
It seems as if the Deity dressed each soul which he 
sends into nature in certain virtues and powers not 
communicable to other men, and sending it to per- 
form one more turn through the circle of beings, 
wrote “ Not transferable” and “ Good for this trip 
only,” on these garments of the soul. There is 
somewhat deceptive about the intercourse of minds. 
The boundaries are invisible, but they are never 
crossed. There is such good will to impart, and 
such good will to receive, that each threatens to 
become the other; but the law of individuality col- 
lects its secret strength: you are you, and I am I, 


\. and so we remain. 


For nature wishes every thing to remain itself ; 
and whilst every individual strives to grow and ex- 
clude and to exclude and grow, to the extremities 
of the universe, and to impose the law of its being 
on every other creature, Nature steadily aims to 
protect each against every other. Hach is self- 
defended. Nothing is more marked than the 
power by which individuals are guarded from indi- 
viduals, in a world where every benefactor becomes 
so easily a malefactor only by continuation of his 
activity into places where it is not due; where chil. 


USES OF GREAT MEN. Bo 


dren seem so much at the mercy of their foolish 
parents, and where almost all men are too social 
and interfering. We rightly speak of the guar- 
dian angels of children. How superior in their se- 
curity from infusions of evil persons, from vulgar- 
ity and second thought! They shed their own 
abundant beauty on the objects they behold. 
Therefore they are not at the mercy of such poor 
educators as we adults. If we huff and chide them 
they soon come not to mind it and get a self-reli- 
ance ; and if we indulge them to folly, they learn 
the limitation elsewhere. 

We need not fear excessive influence. A more 
generous trust is permitted. Serve the great. 
Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou 
canst render. Be the limb of their body, the 
breath of their mouth. Compromise thy egotism. 
Who cares for that, so thou gain aught wider and 
nobler? Never mind the taunt of Boswellism : the 
devotion may easily be greater than the wretched 
pride which is guarding its own skirts. Be an- 
other: not thyself, but a Platonist ; not a soul, but 
a Christian; not a naturalist, but a Cartesian ; not 
a poet, but a Shaksperian. In vain, the wheels of 
tendency will not stop, nor will all the forces of in- 
ertia, fear, or of love itself hold thee there. On, 
and forever onward! The microscope observes a 


monad or wheel-insect among the infusories circu- 
VOL. Iv. 3 


34 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


lating in water. Presently a dot appears on the 
animal, which enlarges to a slit, and it becomes 
two perfect animals. The ever-proceeding detach- 
ment appears uot less in all thought and in society. 
Children think they cannot live without their par- 
ents. But, long before they are aware of it, the 
black dot has appeared and the detachment taken 
place. Any accident will now reveal to them their 
independence. 


But great men : — the word is injurious. Is 
there caste ? is there fate? What becomes of the 
promise to virtue? The thoughtful youth laments 
the superfcetation of nature. ‘Generous and hand- 
some, he says, ‘is your hero; but look at yonder 
poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow ; 
look at his whole nation of Paddies.’ Why are 
the masses, from the dawn of history down, food 
for knives and powder? The idea dignifies a few 
leaders, who have sentiment, opinion, love, self-de- 
votion ; and they make war and death sacred ;—. 
but what for the wretches whom they hire and 
kill ? |The cheapness of man is every day’s trag- 
edy.” It is as real a loss that others should be 
low as that we should be low ; for we must have 
’ society. 

Is it a reply to these suggestions to say, Society 
is a Pestalozzian school: all are teachers and pu 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 85 


pils in turn? We are equally served by receiving 
and by imparting. Men who know the same things 
are not long the best company for each other. 
But bring to each an intelligent person of another 
experience, and it is as if you let off water from a 
lake by cutting a lower basin. It seems a mechan- 
ical advantage, and great benefit it is to each 
speaker, as he can now paint out his thought to 
himself. We pass very fast, in our personal 
moods, from dignity to dependence. And if any 
appear never to assume the chair, but always to 
stand and serve, it is because we do not see the 
company in a sufficiently long period for the whole- 
rotation of parts to come about. As to what we 
call the masses, and common men, — there are no 
common men. All men are at last of a size; and 
true art is only possible on the conviction that 
every talent has its apotheosis somewhere. Fair 
play and an open field and freshest laurels to all 
who have won them! But heaven reserves an 
equal scope for every creature. Each is uneasy 
until he has produced his private ray unto the con- 
cave sphere and beheld his talent also in its last 
nobility and exaltation. 

The heroes of the hour are relatively great; of 
a faster growth ; or they are such in whom, at the 
moment of success, a quality is ripe which is then 
in request. Other days will demand other quali- 


36 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


ties. Some rays escape the common observer, and 
want a finely adapted eye. Ask the great man if 
there be none greater. His companions are; and 
not the less great but the more that society cannot 
see them. Nature never sends a great man into 
the planet without confiding the secret to another 
soul. 

One gracious fact emerges from these studies, — 
that there is true ascension in our love. The rep- 
)utations of the nineteenth century will one day be 
‘quoted to prove its barbarism. The genius of hu- 
manity is the real subject whose biography is writ- 
ten in our annals. We must infer much, and sup- 
ply many chasms in the record. The history of 
the universe is symptomatic, and life is mnemoni- 
cal. No man, in all the procession of famous men, 
is reason or illumination or that essence we were 
looking for ; but is an exhibition, in some quarter, 
of new possibilities. Could we one day complete 
the immense figure which these flagrant points com- 
pose! The study of many individuals leads us to 
an elemental region wherein the individual is lost, 
or wherein all touch by their summits. Thought 
and feeling that break out there cannot be im- 
pounded by any fence of personality. This is the 
key to the power of the greatest men, —their spirit 
diffuses itself. A new quality of mind travels by 
night and by day, in concentric circles from its ori- 


USES OF GREAT MEN. 37 


gin, and publishes itself by unknown methods: the 
union of all minds appears intimate ; what gets ad- 
mission to one, cannot be kept out of any other; the . 
smallest acquisition of truth or of energy, in any 





quarter, is so much good to_the commonwealth of 
souls. If the disparities of talent and position van- 
ish when the individuals are seen in the duration 
which is necessary to complete the career of each, 
even more swiftly the seeming injustice disappears 
when we ascend to the central identity of all the 
individuals, and know that they are made of the 
substance which ordaineth and doeth. 

The genius of humanity is the right point of 
view of history. The qualities abide; the men 
who exhibit them have now more, now less, and 
pass away; the qualities remain on another brow. 
No experience is more familiar. Once you saw 
pheenixes: they are gone; the world is not there- 
fore disenchanted. The vessels on which you read 
sacred emblems turn out to be common pottery ; 
but the sense of the pictures is sacred, and you 
may still read them transferred to the walls of the 
world. For a time our teachers serve us personally,) 
as metres or milestones of progress. Once they 
were angcls of knowledge and their figures touched 
the sky. Then we drew near, saw their means, 
culture and limits; and they yielded their place 
to other geniuses. Happy, if a few names remain 


38 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


so high that we have not been able to read them 
nearer, and age and comparison have not robbed 
‘them of a ray. But at last we shall cease to look in 
men for completeness, and shall content ourselves 
with their social and delegated quality. AIl that 
respects the individual is temporary and prospec- 
tive, like the individual himself, whe is ascending 
out of his limits into a catholic existence. We 
have never come at the true and best benefit of any 
genius so long as we believe him an original force. 
In the moment when he ceases to help us as a 
cause, he begins to help us more as an effect. Then 
he appears as an exponent of a vaster mind and 
will. The opaque self becomes transparent with 
the light of the First Cause. 

Yet, within the limits of human education and 
| agency, we may say great men exist that there may 
be greater men. The destiny of organized nature 
is amelioration, and who can tell its limits? It is 
for man to tame the chaos; on every side, whilst 
he lives, to scatter the seeds of science and of song, 
that climate, corn, animals, men, may be milder, 
and the germs of love and benefit may be multi- 
plied. 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 


i eiiauk ig ba eer, “i ae 


_pogied tical bat 0 


te <3 om ne bene ihe Riss a me pee: 


a, 


nak 


a ae re jan me “ te 





II. 
PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 


Go 


AmoneG secular books, Plato only is entitled to 
Omar’s fanatical compliment to the Koran, when 
he said, “ Burn the libraries; for their value is in , 
this book.” These sentences contain the culture 
of nations; these are the corner-stone of schools; 
these are the fountain-head of literatures. A dis- 
cipline it is in logic, arithmetic, taste, symmetry, 
poetry, language, rhetoric, ontology, morals or prac- 
tical wisdom. There was never such range of spec- 
ulation. Out of Plato come all things that are 
still written and debated among men of thought. 
Great havoc makes he among our originalities. We , 
have reached the mountain from which all these 
drift boulders were detached. The Bible of the 
learned for twenty-two hundred years, every brisk. 
young man who says in succession fine things to 
each reluctant generation, — Boethius, Rabelais, 
Erasmus, Bruno, Locke, Rousseau, Alfieri, Cole- 
ridge, —is some reader of Plato, translating into , 
the vernacular, wittily, his good things. Even the 


(ee 


42 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


men of grander proportion suffer some deduction 
from the misfortune (shall I say?) of coming after 
this exhausting generalizer. St. Augustine, Coper- 
nicus, Newton, Behmen, Swedenborg, Goethe, _are 
likewise his debtors and must say after him. { For 
it is fair to credit the broadest generalizer with all 


-) the particulars deducible from his thesis. | 


Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato, — at 
once the glory and the shame of mankind, since 
neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any 
idea to his categories. No wife, no children had he, 
and the thinkers of all civilized nations are his pos- 
terity and are tinged with his mind. How many 
great men Nature is incessantly sending up out of 
night, to be his men,— Platonists! the Alexandri- 
ans, a constellation of genius; the Elizabethans, 
not less; Sir Thomas More, Henry More, John 
Hales, John Smith, Lord Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, 
Ralph Cudworth, Sydenham, Thomas Taylor; Mar- 
cilius Ficinus and Picus Mirandola. Calvinism is 
in his Phedo: Christianity is in it. Mahometan- 
ism draws all its philosophy, in its hand-book of 
morals, the Akhlak-y-Jalaly, from him. Mysti- 
cism finds in Plato all its texts. This citizen of a 
town in Greece is no villager nor patriot. An 
Englishman reads and says, ‘ how English!’ a Ger- 
man, —‘how Teutonic!’ an Italian, —‘how Ro- 


man and how Greek!’ As they say that Helen 


HEA TO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 43 


of Argos had that universal beauty that every body 
felt related to her, so Plato seems to a reader in 
New England an American genius. His broad 
humanity transcends all sectional lines. 

This range of Plato instructs us what to think of 
the vexed question concerning his reputed works, 
—what are genuine, what spurious. It is singu- 
lar that wherever we find a man higher by a whole 
head than any of his contemporaries, it is sure to 
come into doubt what are his real works. Thus) 
Homer, Plato, Raffaelle, Shakspeare. For these 
men magnetise their contemporaries, so that their 
companions can do for them what they can never do 
for themselves ; and the great man does thus live in 
several bodies, and write, or paint or act, by many 
hands; and after some time it is not easy to say 
what is the authentic work of the master and what 
is only of his school. 

Plato, too, like every great man, consumed his 
own times. What is a great man but one of great 
affinities, who takes up into himself all arts, sci- 
ences, all knowables, as his food? He can spare 
nothing ; he can dispose of every thing. What is 
not good for virtue, is good for knowledge. Hence 
his contemporaries tax him with plagiarism. But 
the inventor only knows how to borrow; and so- 
ciety is glad to forget the innumerable laborers 
who ministered to this architect, and reserves all 


44 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


its gratitude for him. When we are praising 
Plato, it seems we are praising quotations from 
Solon and Sophron and Philolaus. ‘Be it so. Every 
© book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation 
\out of all forests and mines and stone quarries; and | 
every man is a quotation from all his ancestors. 
/ And this grasping inventor puts all nations. under | 
\ contribution. us F. 
| Plato absorbed the learning of his times, — Phi- 
lolaus, Timzeus, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and what 
else; then his master, Socrates; and finding him- 
self still capable of a larger synthesis, — beyond all 
example then or since, — he travelled into Italy, 
to gain what Pythagoras had for him; then into 
Egypt, and perhaps still farther East, to import the 
other element, which Europe wanted, into the Euro- 
pean mind. This breadth entitles him to stand as 
the representative of philosophy. He says, in the 
Republic, “Such a genius as philosophers must of 
necessity have, is wont but seldom in all its parts 
to meet in one man, but its different parts gener- 
ally spring up in different persons.” {Every man 
who would do anything well, must come to it from 
a higher ground.) A philosopher must be more than 
a philosopher. Plato is clothed with the powers of 
a poet, stands upon the highest place of the poet, 
and (though I doubt he wanted the decisive gift of 
lyri¢ expression), mainly is not a poet because he 
chose to use the poetic gift to an ulterior purpose. 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. A5 


Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. 
Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. 
They lived in their writings, and so their house 
and street life was trivial and commonplace. If 
you would know their tastes and complexions, the 
most admiring of their readers most resembles 
them. Plato especially has no-external biography. 
If he had lover, wife, or children, we hear nothing 
of them. He ground them all into paint. As a 
good chimney burns its smoke, so a philosopher 
converts the value of all his fortunes into his in- 
tellectual performances. 

He was born 427, A. C., about the time of the 
death of Pericles; was of patrician connection in 
his times and city, and is said to have had an early 
inclination for war, but, in his twentieth year, 
meeting with Socrates, was easily dissuaded from 
this pursuit and remained for ten years his scholar, 
until the death of Socrates. He then went to 
Megara, accepted the invitations of Dion and of 
Dionysius to the court of Sicily, and went thither 
three times, though very capriciously treated. He 
travelled into Italy; then into Egypt, where he 
stayed a long time; some say three, —some say 
thirteen years. It is said he went farther, into 
Babylonia: this is uncertain. Returning to Athens, 
he gave lessons in the Academy to those whom his 
fame drew thither; and died, as we have received 
it, in the act of writing, at eighty-one years. 


46 REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


But the biography of Plato is interior. We 
zare to account for the supreme elevation of this 
Sman in the intellectual history of our race, — how 
it happens that in proportion to the culture of 

men they become his scholars; that, as our Jewish 
Bible has implanted itself in the table-talk and 
household life of every man and woman in the 
Huropean and American nations, so the writings of 
Plato have preoccupied every school of learning, 
every lover of thought, every church, every poet, 
— making it impossible to think, on certain levels, 
except through him. He stands between the trath 
and every man’s mind, and has almost impressed 
language and the primary forms of thought with 
his name and seal. Jam struck, in reading him, 
with the extreme modernness of his style and spirit. 
Here is the germ of that Europe we know so well, 
in its long history of arts and arms; here are all 
its traits, already discernible in the mind of Plato, 
—and in none before him. It has spread itself 
since into a hundred histories, but has added no 
new element. This perpetual modernness is the 
measure of merit in every work of art; since the 
author of it was not misled by any thing short- 
lived or local, but abode by real and abiding traits. 
/How Plato came thus to be Europe, and philoso- 
phy, and almost literature, is the problem for us te 
solve. 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 47 


This could not have happened without a sound, 
sincere and catholic man, able to honor, at the 
same time, the ideal, or laws of the mind, and fate, 
or the order of nature. The first period of a na- 
tion, as of an individual, is the period of uncon- 
scious strength. Children cry, scream and stamp 
with fury, unable to express their desires. As 
soon as they can speak and tell their want and 
the reason of it, they become gentle. In adult life, 
whilst the perceptiéns are obtuse, men and women 
talk vehemently and superlatively, blunder and 
quarrel: their manners are full of desperation ; 
their speech is full of oaths. As socn as, with cul- 
ture, things have cleared up a little, and they see 
them no longer in lumps and masses but accurately 
distributed, they desist from that weak vehemence 
and explain their meaning in detail. If the tongue 
had not been framed for articulation, man would 
still be a beast in the forest. The same weakness 
and want, on a higher plane, occurs daily in the 
education of ardent young men and women. ‘ Ah! 
you don’t understand me; I have never. met with 
any one who comprehends me:’ and they sigh and 
weep, write verses and walk alone, — fault of 
power to express their precise meaning. In a 
month or two, through the favor of their good gen- 
ius, they meet some one so related as to assist their 
voleanic estate, and, good communication being 


48 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


once established, they are thenceforward good citi- 
zens. It is ever thus. The progress is to accu- 
racy, to skill, to truth, from blind force. 

There is a moment in the history of every na- 
tion, when, proceeding out of this brute youth, the 
perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have 
not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that 
instant, extends across the entire scale, and, with 
his feet still planted on the immense forces of 
night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar 
and stellar creation. That is the moment of adult 
health, the culmination of power. 

Such is the history of Europe, in all points; and 
such in philosophy. Its early records, almost per- 
ished, are of the immigrations from Asia, bringing 
with them the dreams of: barbarians; a confusion 
of crude notions of morals and of natural philos- 
ophy, gradually subsiding through the partial in- 
sight of single teachers. 

Before Pericles came the Seven Wise Masters, 
and we have the beginnings of geometry, meta- 
physics and ethics: then the partialists, — deduc- 
ing the origin of things from flux or water, or from 
air, or from fire, or from mind. All mix with 
these causes mythologic pictures. At last comes 
Plato, the distributor, who needs no barbaric paint, 
or tattoo, or whooping; for he can define. He 
leaves with Asia the vast and superlative; he is 


PLATO: OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 49 


the arrival of accuracy and intelligence. “He 
shall be as a god to me, who can rightly divide 
and define.” 


This defining is philosophy. Philosophy is the (_ 


account which t. the human mind gives to itself of 
the constitution ¢ of ‘the “world. Two cardinal facts 
lie forever at the ‘base ; : the one, and the two. — / 
1. Unity, or Identity; and, 2. Variety. We unite \ 
all things by perceiving the law which pervades 
them ; by perceiving the superficial differences and 
the profound resemblances. But every mental 
act, — this very perception of identity or oneness, 
recognizes the difference of things. Oneness and 
otherness. It is impossible to tee or to ‘think 
‘without embracing both. Rearras Reverie 
The mind is urged to ask for one cause et many 
effects ; then for the cause of that; and again the 
cause, diving still into the profound: self-assured 
that it shall arrive at an absolute and sufficient 
one, —a one that shall be all. ‘In the midst of | 
the sun is the light, in the midst of the light is_ 
truth, and in the midst of truth is the imperishable | 
being,’ say the Vedas. All philosophy, of East 
and West, has the same centripetence. Urged by “ 
an opposite necessity, the mind returns from the 
one to that which is not one, but other or many ; 
from cause to effect; and affirms the necessary 


existence of variety, the self-existence of both, as 
VOL. IV. 4 


50 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


each is involved in the other. These strictly- 
blended elements it is the problem of thought to 
separate and to reconcile. Their existence is mu- 
tually contradictory and exclusive; and each so 
fast slides into the other that we can never say 
what is one, and what it is not. The Proteus is as 
nimble in the highest as in the lowest grounds ; 
when we contemplate the one, the true, the good, — 
as in the surfaces and extremities of matter. 

In all nations there are minds which incline to 
dwell in the conception of the fundamental Unity. 
The raptures of prayer and ecstasy of devotion lose 
all being in one Being. This tendency finds its 
highest expression in the religious writings of 
the East, and chiefly in the Indian Scriptures, in 
the Vedas, the Bhagavat Geeta, and the Vishnu 
Purana. Those writings contain little else than 
this idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains 
in celebrating it. 

The Same, the Same: friend and foe are of one 
stuff; the ploughman, the plough and the furrow 
are of one stuff; and the stuff is such and so much 
that the variations of form are unimportant. ‘“ You 
are fit’ (says the supreme Krishna to a sage ) “to 
apprehend that you are not distinct from me. That 
which I am, thou art, and that also is this world, 
with its gods and heroes and mankind. Men con. 
template distinctions, because they are stupefied 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 51 


with ignorance.” ‘The words 7 and mine consti- 
tute ignorance. What is the great end of all, you 
shall now learn from me. It is sowl, —one in all 
bodies, pervading, uniform, perfect, preeminent 
over nature, exempt from birth, growth and decay, 
omnipresent, made up of true knowledge, indepen- 
dent, unconnected with unrealities, with name, 
species and the rest, in time past, present and to 
come. The knowledge that this spirit, which is 
essentially one, 1s in one’s own and in all other 
bodies, is the wisdom of one who knows the unity 
of things. As one diffusive air, passing through 
the perforations of a flute, is distinguished as the 
notes of a scale, so the nature of the Great Spirit 
is single, though its forms be manifold, arising 
from the consequences of acts. When the differ- 
ence of the investing form, as that of god or the 
rest, is destroyed, there is no distinction.” ‘ The 
whole world is but a manifestation of Vishnu, who 
is identical with all things, and is to be regarded 
by the wise as not differing from, but as the same 
as themselves. I neither am going nor coming ; 
nor is my dwelling in any one place ; nor art thou, 
thou; nor are others, others; noram I, I.” As if 
he had said, ‘ All is for the soul, and the soul is 
Vishnu; and animals and stars are transient paint- 
ings; and light is whitewash; and durations are 
deceptive ; and form 1s imprisonment; and heaven 


52 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


itself a decoy.’ That which the soul seeks is reso 
lution into being above form, out of Tartarus and 
out of heaven,.— liberation from nature. 

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in 
which all things are absorbed, action tends directly 
backwards to diversity. The first is the course 
or gravitation of mind; the second is the power 
of nature. Nature is the manifold. The unity 
absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and 
creates. These two principles reappear and inter- 
penetrate all things, all thought; the one, the 
many. One is being; the other, intellect: one is 
\ necessity; the other, freedom : one, rest; the other, 
\ motion : one, power; the other, distribution: one, 
' strength; the other, pleasure: one, consciousness ; 
the other, definition: one, genius; the other, talent: 
one, earnestness ; the other, knowledge: one, pos- 
session; the other, trade: one, caste; the other, 
culture: one, king; the other, democracy: and, if 
we dare carry these generalizations a step higher, 
and name the last tendency of both, we might 
say, that the end of the one is escape from organ- 
ization, — pure science; and the end of the other 
is the highest instrumentality, or use of means, or 
executive deity. 

Each student adheres, by temperament and by 
habit, to the first or to the second of these gods of 
the mind. By religion, he tends to unity; by in. 


PLATOR Oh 1 i PHILOSOPHER. 53 


tellect, or by the senses, to the many. A_ too 
rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to 
parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of spec- 
ulation. 

To this partiality the history of nations corre- 
sponded. The country of unity, of immovable insti- 


tutions, the seat of a philosophy delighting in ab-| 


stractions, of men faithful in doctrine and in prac-| 
tice to the idea of a deaf, unimplorable, immense \ 
fate, is Asia; and it realizes this faith in the social | 


institution of caste. On the other side, the genius 
of Europe is active and creative : it resists caste by 
culture ; its philosophy was a discipline; it is a 


i 


land of arts, inventions, trade, freedom. If the > 


East loved infinity, the West delighted in bounda- 
ries. ) 
European civility is the triumph of talent, the 
extension of system, the sharpened understanding, 
adaptive skill, delight in forms, delight in manifes- 
tation, in comprehensible results. Pericles, Athens, 
Greece, had been working in this element with the 
joy of genius not yet chilled by any foresight of 
the detriment of an excess. They saw before them 
no sinister political economy ; no ominous Malthus ; 
no Paris or London; no pitiless subdivision of 
classes, — the doom of the pin-makers, the doom of 
the weavers, of dressers, of stockingers, of carders, 
of spinners, of colliers; no Ireland; no Indian 


54 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


caste, superinduced by the efforts of Europe to 
throw it off. The understanding was in its health 
and prime. Art was in its splendid novelty. 
‘They cut the Pentelican marble as if it were snow, ) 
and their perfect works in architecture and sculp- 
sure seemed things of course, not more difficult 
than the completion of a new ship at the Medford 
yards, or new mills at Lowell. These things are 
in course, and may be taken for granted. The Ro- 
man legion, Byzantine legislation, English trade, 
the saloons of Versailles, the cafés of Paris, the 
steam-mill, steamboat, steam-coach, may all be seen 
in perspective; the town-meeting, the ballot-box, 
the newspaper and cheap press. 

Meantime, Plato, in Egypt and in Eastern pil- 
erimages, imbibed the idea of one Deity, in which 
all things are absorbed. The unity of Asia and 
the detail of Europe; the infinitude of the Asiatic 
soul and the defining, result-loving, machine-mak- 
ing, surface-seeking, opera-going Europe, — Plato 
came to join, and, by contact, to enhance the en- 
ergy of each. The excellence of Europe and Asia 
are in his brain. Metaphysics and natural philos- 
ophy expressed the genius of Europe ; he substructs 
the religion of Asia, as the base. 

In short, a balanced soul was born, perceptive of 
the two elements. It is as easy to be great as to 
be small. / The reason why we do not at once be 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 55 


lieve in admirable souls is because they are not in 
our experience. In actual life, they are so rare as 
to be incredible ; but primarily there is not only no 
presumption against them, but the strongest pre- 
sumption in favor of their appearance. but 
whether voices were heard in the sky, or not: 
whether his mother or his father dreamed that the 
infant man-child was the son of Apollo; whether 
a swarm of bees settled on his lips, or not;—({a \, 
man who could see two sides of a thing was. born.) | 
The wonderful synthesis so familiar in nature ; the 
upper and the under side of the medal of Jove 
the union of impossibilities, which reappears in 
every object ; ius real and its ideal power, — was 
now also transferred entire to the consciousness of 
a man. ij 

The balanced soul came. If he loved abstract 
truth, he saved himself by propounding the most 
popular of all principles, the absolute good, which 
rules rulers, and’ judges the judge. If he made 
transcendental distinctions, he fortified himself by 
drawing all his illustrations from sources disdained 
by orators and polite conversers ; from mares and 
puppies; from pitchers and soup-ladles ; from cooks 
and criers; the shops of potters, horse-doctors, 
butchers and fishmongers. He cannot forgive in 
himself a partiality, but is resolved that the two 
poles of thought shall appear in his statement. 


56 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


His argument and his sentence are self-poised and 
spherical. The two poles appear; yes, and be- 
come two hands, to grasp and appropriate their 
own. 

Every great artist has been such by synthesis. 
Our strength is transitional, alternating ; or, shall 
I say, a thread of two strands. The sea-shore, sea 
seen from shore, shore seen from sea; the taste of 
two metals in contact; and our enlarged powers at 
the approach and at the departure of a friend; the 
experience of poetic creativeness, which is not 
found in staying at home, nor yet in travelling, but 
in transitions from one to the other, which must 
therefore be adroitly managed to present as much 
transitional surface as possible; this command of 
two elements must explain the power and the 
charm of Plato. Art expresses the one or the 
same by the different. Thought seeks to know 
unity in unity ; poetry to show it by variety ; that 
is, always by an object or symbol. Plato keeps the 
two vases, one of ether and one of pigment, at his 
side, and invariably uses both. ‘Things added to 
things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. 
Things used as language are inexhaustibly attrac- 
tive. Plato turns incessantly the obverse and the 
reverse of the medal of Jove. 

To take an example: — The physical philoso- 
pbers had sketched each his theory of the world; 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. or 


the theory of atoms, of fire, of flux, of spirit; the 
ories mechanical and chemical in their genius. 
Plato, a master of mathematics, studious of all nat- 
ural laws and causes, feels these, as second causes, 
to be no theories of the world but bare inventories 
and lists. To the study of nature he therefore 
prefixes the dogma, —‘“ Let us declare the cause 
which led the Supreme Ordainer to produce and 
compose the universe. He was good; and he who 
is good has no kind of envy. Exempt from envy, 
he wished that all things should be as much as 
possible like himself. Whosoever, taught by wise 
men, shall admit this as the prime cause of the 
origin and foundation of the world, will be in the 
truth.” “ All things are for the sake of the good, 
and it is the cause of every thing beautiful.” This 
dogma animates and impersonates his philosophy. 
The synthesis which makes the character of his 
mind appears in all his talents. Where there is 
ereat compass of wit, we usually find excellencies 
that combine easily in the living man, but in de- 
scription appear incompatible. The mind of Plato 
is not to be exhibited by a Chinese catalogue, but 
is to be apprehended by an original mind in the), 
exercise of its original power. In him the freest 
abandonment is united with the precision of a 
geometer. His daring imagination gives him the 
more solid grasp of facts; as the birds of highest 


58 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


flight have the strongest alar bones. His patrician 
polish, his intrinsic elegance, edged by an irony 
so subtle that it stings and paralyzes, adorn the 
soundest health and strength of frame. According: 
to the old sentence, “If Jove should descend to 
the earth, he would speak in the style of Plato.” 
With this palatial air there is, for the direct 
aim of several of his works and: running through 
the tenor of them all, a certain earnestness, which 
mounts, in the Republic. and in the Phedo, to 
piety. He has been charged with feigning sickness 
at the time of the death of Socrates. But the anec- 
dotes that have come down from the times attest 
his manly interference before the people in his 
master’s behalf, since even the savage ery of the 
assembly to Plato is preserved; and the indigna- 
tion towards popular government, in many of his 
pieces, expresses a personal exasperation. He has 
a probity, a native reverence for justice and honor, 
and a humanity which makes him tender for the 
superstitions of the people. Add to this, he be- 
lieves that poetry, prophecy and the high insight 
are from a wisdom of which man is not master; 
that the gods never philosophize, but by a celestial 
mania these miracles are accomplished. Horsed 
on these winged steeds, he sweeps the dim regions, 
visits worlds which flesh cannot enter; he saw the 
souls in pain, he hears the doom of the judge, he 


ay 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 59 


beholds the penal metempsychosis, the Fates, with 
the rock and shears, and hears the intoxicating 
hum of their spindle. 

But his circumspection never forsook him. One 
would say he had read the inscription on the gates 
of Busyrane,— ‘“ Be bold;” and on the second 
gate, —‘‘ Be bold, be bold,,and evermore be bold; ” 
and then again had paused well at the third gate, 
—‘“ Be not too bold.” His strength is like the 
momentum of a falling planet, and his mee 
the return of its due and perfect curve, —so excel-/ 
lent is his Greek love of boundary and his skill 
in definition. In reading logarithms one is not 
more secure than in following Plato in his flights. | 
Nothing can be colder than his head, when the 
lightnings of his imagination are playing in the 
sky. He has finished his thinking before he; 
brings it to the reader, and he abounds in the sur- } 
prises of a literary master. He has that opulence 
which furnishes, at every turn, the precise weapon 
he needs. As the rich man wears no more gar- 
ments, drives no more horses, sits in no more 
chambers than the poor,— but has that one dress, 
or equipage, or instrument, which is fit for the 
hour and the need; so Plato, in his plenty, is never 
restricted, but has the fit word. . There is indeed 
no weapon in all the armory of wit which he did 
not possess and use, — epic, analysis, mania, intul- 


60 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


tion, music, satire and irony, down to the custom- 
ary and polite. His illustrations are poetry and his 
jests illustrations. Socrates’ profession of obstetric 
art is good philosophy; and his finding that word 
“cookery,” and “adulatory art,” for rhetoric, in 
the Gorgias, does us a substantial service still. 
No orator can measure in effect with him who can 
give good nicknames. 

What moderation and understatement and check- 
ing his thunder in mid volley! He has good-na- 
turedly furnished the courtier and citizen with all 
that can be said against the schools. ‘* For philos- 
ophy is an elegant thing, if any one modestly med- 
dles with it; but if he is conversant with it more 
than is becoming, it corrupts the man.” He could 
well afford to be generous,—he, who from the 
sunlike centrality and reach of his vision, had a 
faith without cloud. Such as his perception, was 
his speech: he plays with the doubt and makes the 
most of it: he paints and quibbles; and by and by 
comes a sentence that moves the sea and land. 
The admirable earnest comes not only at intervals, 
in the perfect yes and no of the dialogue, but in 
bursts of light. “I, therefore, Callicles, am per- 
suaded by these accounts, and consider how I may 
exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy con- 
dition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors that 
most men value, and looking to the truth, I shall 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 61 


endeavor in reality to live as virtuously as I can; 
and when [ die, to die so. And I invite all other 
men, to the utmost of my power; and you too I 
m turn invite to this contest, which, I affirm, 
surpasses all contests here.” 

He is a great average man; one who, to the best 
thinking, adds a proportion and equality in his fac- 
ulties, so that men see in him their own dreams and 
glimpses made available and made to pass for what 
they are. A great common-sense is his warrant 
and qualification to be the world’s interpreter. He 
has reason, as all the philosophic and poetic class 
have: but he has also what they have not, — this 
strong solving sense to reconcile his poetry with the 
appearances of the world, and build a bridge from 
the streets of cities to the Atlantis. He omits never 
this graduation, but slopes his thought, however 
picturesque the precipice on one side, to an access 
from the plain. He never writes in ecstacy, or 
catches us up into poetic raptures. at 

Plato apprehended the cardinal facts. He could 
prostrate himself on the earth and cover his eyes 
whilst he adored that which cannot be numbered, 
or gauged, or known, or named: that of which 
every thing can be affirmed and denied: that 
“which is entity and nonentity.” He called it 
super-essential. He even stood ready, as in the 


62 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Parmenides, to demonstrate that it was so,— that 
this Being exceeded the limits of intellect. No 
man ever more fully acknowledged the Ineffable. 
Having paid his homage, as for the human race, 
to the Illimitable, he then stood erect, and for the 
human race affirmed, ‘And yet things are know- 
able!’ —that is, the Asia in his mind was first 
heartily honored, —the ocean of love and power, 
before form, before will, before knowledge, the 
Same, the Good, the One; and now, refreshed and 
empowered by this worship, the instinct of Eu- 
rope, namely, culture, returns ; and he cries, ‘ Yet 
things are knowable!’ They are knowable, be- 





cause being _ from one, things correspond. ee 
is a scale; and the ‘correspondence of heaven to 
earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, 
is our guide. As there is a science of stars, 
called astronomy; a science of quantities, called 
' mathematics; a science of qualities, called chem- 
(istry 3 so there is a science of sciences, —I call 
(it Dialectic, — which is the Intellect discriminat- 
= the false and the true. It rests on the obser- 
,/ vation of identity and diversity; for to judge is 


WY 
/ 


to unite to an object the notion which belongs to 


it. The sciences, even the best,— mathematics and 
astronomy, — are like sportsmen, who seize what- 
ever prey offers, even without being able to make 
any use of it. Dialectic must teach the use of 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 63 


them. ‘ This is of that rank that no intellectual 
man will enter on any study for its own sake, but 
only with a view to advance himself in that one 
sole science which embraces all.” - 

“The essence or peculiarity of man is to com- 
prehend a whole; or that which in the diversity 
of sensations can be comprised under a rational 
unity.’ ‘The soul which has never perceived 
the truth, cannot pass into the human form.” I 
announce to men the Intellect. I announce the 
good of being interpenetrated by the mind that 
made nature: this benefit, namely, that it can 
understand nature, which it made and maketh. 
Nature is good, but intellect is better: as the law- 
giver is before the law-receiver. I give you joy, 
O sons of men! that truth is altogether whole- 
some; that we have hope to search out what 
might be the very self of everything. The mis- 
ery of man is to be baulked of the sight of essence 
and to be stuffed with conjectures; but the su- 
preme good is reality; the supreme beauty is 
reality ; and all virtue and all felicity depend on 
this science of the real: for courage is nothing 
else than knowledge; the fairest fortune that can 
befall man is to be guided by his demon to that 
which is truly his own. ‘This also is the essence 
of justice, —to attend every one his own: nay, 
the notion of virtue is not to be arrived at except 


64 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


through direct contemplation of the divine essence. 
Courage then! for “the persuasion that we must 
search that which we do not know, will render 
us, beyond comparison, better, braver and more 
industrious than if we thought it impossible to 
discover what we do not know, and useless to 
search for it.” He secures a position not to be 
commanded, by his passion for reality; valuing 
philosophy only as it is the pleasure of conversing 
with real being. 

Thus, full of the genius of Europe, he said, Cul- 
ture. He saw the institutions of Sparta and recog- 
nized, more genially one would say than any since, 
the hope of education. He delighted in every ac- 
complishment, in every graceful and useful and 
truthful performance; above all in the splendors 
of genius and intellectual achievement. ‘ The 
whole of life, O Socrates,” said Glauco, “ is, with 
the wise, the measure of hearing such discourses as 
these.” What a price he sets on the feats of tal- 
ent, on the powers of Pericles, of Isocrates, of Par- 
menides! What price above price on the talents 
themselves! He called the several faculties, gods, 
in his beautiful personation. What value he gives 
to the art of gymnastic in education ; what to ge- 
ometry ; what to music; what to astronomy, whose 
appeasing and medicinal power he celebrates! In 
the Timzus he indicates the highest employment 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 65 


of the eyes. ‘“ By us it is asserted that God in- 
vented and bestowed sight on us for this purpose, 
— that on surveying the circles of intelligence in 
the heavens, we might properly employ those of our 
own minds, which, though disturbed when com- 
pared with the others that are uniform, are still 
allied to their circulations; and that having thus 
learned, and being naturally possessed of a correct 
reasoning faculty, we might, by imitating the uni- 
form revolutions of divinity, set right our own wan- 
derings and blunders.” And in the Republic, — 
“ By each of these disciplines a certain organ of 
the soul is both purified and reanimated which is 
blinded and buried by studies of another kind ; an 
organ better worth saving than ten thousand eyes, 
since truth is perceived by this alone.” . 
He said, Culture ; but he first admitted its basis, 
and gave immeasurably the first place to advan- 
tages of nature. His patrician tastes laid stress on 
the distinctions of birth. In the doctrine of the 
organic character and disposition is the origin of 
caste. ‘Such as were fit to govern, into their com- 
position the informing Deity mingled gold; into 
the military, silver; iron and brass for husbandmen 
and artificers.” The Kast confirms itself, in all 
ages, in this faith. The Koran is explicit on this 
point of caste. ‘ Men have their metal, as of gold 


and silver. Those of you who were the worthy 
VOL. Iv. 5 


66 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


ones in the state of ignorance, will be the worthy 
ones in the state of faith, as soon as you embrace 
it.” Plato was not less firm. ‘Of the five orders 
of things, only four can be taught to the generality 
of men.” In the Republic he insists on the tem- 
peraments of the youth, as first of the first. 

A happier example of the stress laid on nature 
is in the dialogue with the young Theages, Who 
wishes to receive lessons from Socrates. Socrates 
declares that if some have grown wise by asso- 
ciating with him, no thanks are due to him; but, 
simply, whilst they were with him they grew wise, 
not because of him; he pretends not to know the 
way of it. “Itis adverse to many, nor can those 
be benefited by associating with me whom the De- 
mon opposes ; so that it is not possible for me to 
live with these. With many however he does not 
prevent me from conversing, who yet are not at all 
benefited by associating with me. Such, O The- 
ages, is the association with me; for, if it pleases 
the God, you will make great and rapid _profi- 
ciency: you will not, if he does not please. Judge 
whether it is not safer to be instructed by some 
one of those who have power over the benefit which 
they impart to men, than by me, who benefit or not, 
just as it may happen.” As if he had said, ‘I have 
no system. I cannot be answerable for you. You 
will be what you must. If there is love between 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 67 


us, inconceivably delicious and profitable will our 
intercourse be; if not, your time is lost and you 
will only annoy me. I shall seem to you stupid, 
and the reputation I have, false. Quite above us, 
beyond the will of you or me, is this secret affinity 
or repulsion laid. All my good is magnetic, and 
I educate, not by lessons, but by going about -my 
business.’ | 

He said, Culture; he said, Nature; and he faile 
not to add, ‘ There is also the divine.’ There is 
no thought in any mind but it quickly tends to 
convert itself into a power and organizes a huge 
instrumentality of means. Plato, lover of limits, 
loved the illimitable, saw the enlargement and no- 
bility which come from truth itself and good itself, 
and attempted as if on the part of the human in- 
tellect, once for all to do it adequate homage, — 
homage fit for the immense soul to receive, and yet 
homage becoming the intellect to render. He said 
then ‘Our faculties run out into infinity, and re- 
turn to us thence. We can define but a little way; 
but here is a fact which will not be skipped, and 
Which to shut our eyes upon is suicide. All things 
are in a scale; and, begin where we will, ascend 
and ascend. All things are symbolical; and what 
we call results are beginnings.’ 

A key to the method and completeness of Plato 
is his twice bisected line. After he has illustrated 


68 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


the relation between the absolute good and true 
and the forms of the intelligible world, he says :— 
*“* Let there be a line cut in two unequal parts. 
Cut again each of these two main parts, — one 
representing the visible, the other the intelligible 
world, — and let these two new sections represent 
the bright part and the dark part of each of these 
worlds. You will have, for one of the sections of 
the visible world, images, that is, both shadows and 
reflections ;—— for the other section, the objects of 
these images, that is, plants, animals, and the works 
of art and nature. Then divide the intelligible 
world in like manner; the one section will be of 
opinions and hypotheses, and the other section of 
truths.” To these four sections, the four opera- 
tions of the soul correspond, — conjecture, faith, 
understanding, reason. As every pool reflects the 
image of the sun, so every thought and thing re- 
stores us an image and creature of the supreme 
Good. The universe is perforated by a million 
channels for his activity. All things mount and 
mount. 

All his thought has this ascension ; in Pheedrusy 
teaching that beauty is the most lovely of all 
things, exciting hilarity and shedding desire and 
confidence through the universe wherever it en- 
ters, and it enters in some degree into all things: 
—but that there is another, which is as much 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 69 


more beautiful than beauty as beauty is than 
chaos ; namely, wisdom, which our wonderful organ 
of sight cannot reach unto, but which, could it be 
seen, would ravish us with its perfect reality. He 
has the same regard to it as the source of excel- 
lence in works of art. When an artificer, he says, 
in the fabrication of any work, looks to that which 
always subsists according to the same; and, em- 
ploying a model of this kind, expresses its idea and 
power in his work, —it must follow that his pro- 
duction should be beautiful. But when he beholds 
that which is born and dies, it will be far from 
beautiful. 

Thus ever: the Banquet is a teaching in the 
same spirit, familiar now to all the poetry and to 
all the sermons of the world, that the love of the 
sexes is initial, and symbolizes at a distance the 
passion of the soul for that immense lake of beauty 
it exists to seek. This faith in the Divinity is 
never out of mind, and constitutes the ground of 
all his dogmas. Body cannot teach wisdom ; -— 
God only. In the same mind he constantly affirms 
that virtue cannot be taught; that it is not a sci- 
ence, but an inspiration, that the greatest goods 
are produced to us through mania and are as- 
signed to us by a divine gift. 

This leads me to that central figure which he 


has established in his Academy as the organ 


70 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


through which every considered opinion shall be 
announced, and whose biography he has likewise se 
labored that the historic facts are lost in the light 
of Plato’s mind. [ Socrates and Plato are the dou- 


(ble star which the most powerful instruments will 
‘ not entirely separate.) Socrates again, in his traits 


and genius, is the best example of that synthesis 
which constitutes Plato’s extraordinary power. 


_Socrates, a man of humble stem, but honest 


enough ; of the commonest history; of a personal 
homeliness so remarkable as to be a cause of wit 
in others: — the rather that his broad good nature 
and exquisite taste for a joke invited the sally, 
which was sure to be paid. The players person- 
ated him on the stage; the potters copied his ugly 
face on their stone jugs. He was a cool fellow, 
adding to his humor a perfect temper and a knowl- 
edge of his man, be he who he might whom he 
talked with, which laid the companion open to cer- 
tain defeat in any debate, — and in debate he im- 
moderately delighted. The young men are prodig- 
iously fond of him and invite him to their feasts, 
whither he goes for conversation. He can drink, 
too; has the strongest head in Athens; and after 
leaving the whole party under the table, goes away 
as if nothing had happened, to begin new dialogues 
with somebody that is sober. In short, he was 
what our country-people call an old one. 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 71 


He affected a good many citizen-like tastes, was 
monstrously fond of Athens, hated trees, never 
willingly went beyond the walls, knew the old 
characters, valued the bores and philistines, thought 
every thing in Athens a little better than anything 
in any other place. He was plain as a Quaker in 
habit and speech, affected low phrases, and illustra- 
tions from cocks and quails, soup-pans and syca- 
more-spoons, grooms and farriers, and unnameable 
offices, — especially if he talked with any superfine 
person. He had a Franklin-like wisdom. Thus 
he showed one who was afraid to go on foot to 
Olympia, that it was no more than his daily walk 
within doors, if continuously extended, would easily 
reach. 

Plain old uncle as he was, with his great ears, 
an immense talker, —the rumor ran that on one 
or two occasions, in the war with Beeotia, he had 
shown a determination which had covered the re- 
treat of a troop; and there was some story that 
under cover of folly, he had, in the city govern- 
ment, when one day he chanced to hold a seat 
there, evinced a courage in opposing singly the 
popular voice, which had well-nigh ruined him. 
He is very poor; but then he is hardy as a soldier, 
and can live on a few olives ; usually, in the strict- 
est sense, on bread and water, except when enter- 
tained by his friends. His necessary expenses 


ne REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


were exceedingly small, and no one could live as he 
did. He wore no under garment; his upper gar- 
ment was the same for summer and winter, and he 
went barefooted ; and it is said that to procure the 
- pleasure, which he loves, of talking at his ease all 
day with the most elegant and cultivated young 
men, he will now and then return to his shop and 
earve statues, good or bad, for sale. However that 
be, it is certain that he had grown to delight in 
nothing else than this conversation; and that, un- 
der his hypocritical pretence of knowing nothing, 
he attacks and brings down all the fine speakers, 
all the fine philosophers of Athens, whether natives 
or strangers from Asia Minor and the islands. 
Nobody can refuse to talk with him, he is so hon- 
est and really curious to know; a man who was 
willingly confuted if he did not speak the truth, 
and who willingly confuted others asserting what 
was false; and not less pleased when confuted than 
when confuting ; for he thought not any evil hap- 
pened to men of such a magnitude as false opinion 
respecting the just and unjust. A pitiless dis- 
putant, who knows nothing, but the bounds of 
whose conquering intelligence no man had ever 
reached ; whose temper was imperturbable ; whose 
dreadful logic was always leisurely and sportive ; 
so careless and ignorant as to disarm the wariest 
and draw them, in the pleasantest manner, into 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 73 


horrible doubts and confusion. But he always 
knew the way out; knew it, yet would not tell it. 
No escape; he drives them to terrible choices 
by his dilemmas, and tosses the Hippiases and 
Gorgiases with their grand reputations, as a boy 
tosses his balls. The tyrannous realist !— Meno 
has discoursed a thousand times, at length, on vir- 
tue, before many companies, and very well, as it ap- 
peared to him; but at this moment he cannot even 
tell what it is, — this cramp-fish of a Socrates has 
so bewitched him. 

This hard-headed humorist, whose strange con- 
eeits, drollery and bonhommie diverted the young 
patricians, whilst the rumor of his sayings and 
quibbles gets abroad every day, — turns out, in the 
sequel, to have a probity as invincible as his logic, 
and to be either insane, or at least, under cover 
of this play, enthusiastic in his religion. When 
accused before the judges of subverting the popu- 
lar creed, he affirms the immortality of the soul, 
the future reward and punishment; and refusing 
to recant, in a caprice of the popular government 
was condemned to die, and sent to the prison. 
Socrates entered the prison and took away all 
ignominy from the place, which could not be a 
prison whilst he was there. .Crito bribed the 
jailer; but Socrates would not go out by treach- 
ery. ‘ Whatever inconvenience ensue, nothing is 


74 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


to be preferred before justice. These things I 
hear like pipes and drums, whose sound makes me 
deaf to every thing you say.” The fame of this 
prison, the fame of the discourses there and the 
drinking of the hemlock are one of the most prec- 
ious passages in the history of the world. 

The rare coincidence, in one ugly body, of the 
droll and the martyr, the keen street and market 
debater with the sweetest saint known to any his- 
tory at that time, had forcibly struck the mind of 
Plato, so capacious of these contrasts; and the fig- 
ure of Socrates by a necessity placed itself in the 
foreground of the scene, as the fittest dispenser of 
the intellectual treasures he had to communicate. 
It was a rare fortune that this Alsop of the mob 
and this robed scholar should meet, to make each 
other immortal in their mutual faculty. The 
strange synthesis in the character of Socrates 
capped the synthesis in the mind of Plato. More- 
over by this means he was able, in the direct way 
and without envy to avail himself of the wit and 
weight of Socrates, to which unquestionably his 
own debt was great; and these derived again their 
principal advantage from the perfect art of Plato. 

It remains to say that the defect of Plato in 
power is only that which results inevitably from 
his quality. He is intellectual in his aim; and 
therefore, in expression, literary. Mounting inte 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. 15 


heaven, diving into the pit, expounding the laws 
of the state, the passion of love, the remorse of 
crime, the hope of the parting soul, — he is liter- 
ary, and never otherwise. It is almost the sole de- 
duction from the merit of Plato that his writings 
have not, —what is no doubt incident to this reg- 
nancy of intellect in his work, — the vital author- 
ity which the screams of prophets and the sermons 
of unlettered Arabs and Jews possess. There is 
an interval; and to cohesion, contact is necessary. 

I know not what can be said in reply to this 
criticism but that we have come to a fact in the 
nature of things: an oak is not an orange. The 
qualities of sugar remain with sugar, and those of 
salt with salt. . 

In the second place, he has not a system. The 
dearest defenders and disciples are at fault. He 
attempted a theory of the universe, and his theory 
is not complete or self-evident. One man thinks 
he means this, and another that; he has said one 
thing in one place, and the reverse of it in another 
place. He is charged with having failed to make 
the transition from ideas to matter. Here is the 
world, sound as a nut, perfect, not the smallest 
piece of chaos left, never a stitch nor an end, not a 
mark of haste, or botching, or second thought ; but 
the theory of the world isa thing of shreds and 
patches. | 

The longest wave is quickly lost in the sea. 


76 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Plato would willingly have a Platonism, a known 
and accurate expression for the world, and it should 
be accurate. It shall be the world passed through 
the mind of Plato, — nothing less. Every atom 
shall have the Platonic tinge; every atom, every 
relation or quality you knew before, you shall know 
again and find here, but now ordered ; not nature, 
but art. And you shall feel that Alexander in- 
deed overran, with men and horses, some countries 
of the planet; but countries, and things of which 
countries are made, elements, planet itself, laws 
of planet and of men, have passed through this 
man as bread into his body, and become no longer 
bread, but body: so all this mammoth morsel has 
become Plato. He has clapped copyright on the 
world. This is the ambition of individualism. But 
the mouthful proves too large. Boa constrictor 
has good will to eat it, but he is foiled. He falls 
abroad in the attempt; and biting, gets strangled : 
the bitten world holds the biter fast by his own 
teeth. There he perishes: unconquered nature 
lives on and forgets him. So it fares with all: so 
must it fare with Plato. In view of eternal na- 
ture, Plato turns out to be philosophical exercita- 
tions. He argues on this side and on that. The 
acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could never 
\tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts 
/can be quoted on both sides of every great ques 
tion from him. 


PLATO; OR, THE PHILOSOPHER. TT 


These things we are forced to say if we must 
eonsider the effort of Plato or of any philosopher 
to dispose of nature, — which will not be disposed 
of. No power of genius has ever yet had the 
smallest success in-explaining existence. The per- 
fect enigma remains. But there is an. injustice in 
assuming this ambition for Plato. Let us not 
seem to treat with flippancy his venerable name. 
Men, in preportion to their intellect, have admitted ;, 
his transcendent claims. The way to know him is | 
to compare him, not with nature, but with other / 
men. How many ages have gone by, and he re- 
mains unappreached! A chief structure of human 
wit, like Karnac, or the mediwval cathedrals, or 
the Etrurian remains, it requires all the breath of 
human faculty to know it. I think it is trueliest 
seen when seen with the most respect. His sense 
deepens, his merits multiply, with study. When 
we say, Here is a fine collection of fables; or when 
we praise the style, or the common sense, or arith- 
metic, we speak as boys, and much of our im- 
patient criticism of the dialectic, I suspect, is ne 
better. 

The criticism is like our impatience of miles, 
when we are in a hurry; but it is still best that 
a mile should have seventeen hundred and sixty 
yards. The great-eyed Plato proportioned the 
lights and shades after the genius of our life. 


PLATO: NEW READINGS. 


— 


THe publication, in Mr. Bohn’s “Serial Libra: 
ry,’ of the excellent translations of Plato, which 
we esteem one of the chief benefits the cheap press 
has yielded, gives us an occasion to take hastily a 
few more notes of the elevation and bearings of 
this fixed star; or to add a bulletin, like the jour- 
nals, of Plato at the latest dates. 


Modern science, by the extent of its generaliza- 
tion, has learned to indemnify the student of man 
for the defects of individuals by tracing growth 
and ascent in races; and, by the simple expedient 
of lighting up the vast background, generates a 
feeling of complacency and hope. The human 
being has the saurian and the plant in his rear. 
His arts and sciences, the easy issue of his brain, 
look glorious when prospectively beheld from the 
distant brain of ox, crocodile and fish. Jt seems 
as if nature, in regarding the geologic night behind 
her, when, in five or six millenniums, she had turned 
out five or six men, as Homer, Phidias, Menu and 


PLATO; NEW READINGS. 79 


Columbus, was no wise discontented with the re- 
sult. These samples attested the virtue of the tree. 
These were a clear amelioration of trilobite and 
saurus, and a good basis for further proceeding. 
With this artist, time and space are cheap, and she 
is insensible to what you say of tedious prepara- 
tion. She waited tranquilly the flowing periods of 
paleontology, for the hour to be struck when man 
should arrive. Then periods must pass before the 
motion of the earth can be suspected ; then before 
the map of the instincts and the cultivable powers 
can be drawn. But as of races, so the successicn 
of individual men is fatal and beautiful, and Plato 
has the fortune in the history of mankind to mark 
an epoch. 

Plato’s fame does not stand on a syllogism, or 
on any masterpieces of the Socratic reasoning, or 
on any thesis, as for example the immortality of 
the soul. He is more than an expert, or a school- 
man, or a geometer, or the prophet of a peculiar 
message. He represents the privilege of the in- 
tellect, the power, namely, of carrying up every 
fact to successive platforms and so disclosing in 
every fact a germ of expansion. ‘These expansions 
are in the essence of thought. The naturalist 
would never help us to them by any discoveries 
of the extent of the universe, but is as poor when 
cataloguing the resolved nebula of Orion, as when 


80 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


measuring the angles of an acre. But the Repub- 
lie of Plato, by these expansions, may be said to 
require and so to anticipate the astronomy of 
Laplace. The expansions are organic. ‘The mind 
does not create what it perceives, any more than 
the eye creates the rose. In ascribing to Plato the 
merit of announcing them, we only say, Here was 
a more complete man, who could apply to nature 
the whole scale of the senses, the understanding 
and the reason. These expansions or extensions 
consist in continuing the spiritual sight where the 
horizon falls on our natural vision, and by this 
second sight discovering the long lines of law 
which shoot in every direction. Everywhere he 
stands on a path which has no end, but runs con- 
tinuously round the universe. Therefore every 
word becomes an exponent of nature. Whatever 
he looks upon discloses a second sense, and ulterior 
senses. His perception of the generation of con- 
traries, of death out of life and life out of death, — 
that law by which, in nature, decomposition is re- 
composition, and putrefaction and cholera are only 
signals of a new creation ; his discernment of the 
little in the large and the large in the small; 
studying the state in the citizen and the citizen 
in the state; and leaving it doubtful whether he 
exhibited the Republic as an allegory on the edu- 
cation of the private soul; his beautiful definitions 


PLATO; NEW READINGS. Si 


of ideas, of time, of form, of figure, of the line, 
sometimes hypothetically given, as his defining of 
virtue, courage, justice, temperance; his love of 
the apologue, and his apologues themselves ; the 
eave of Trophonius ; the ring of Gyges; the char- 
ioteer and two horses; the gelden, silver, brass and 
iron temperaments; Theuth and Thamus ; and the 
visions of Hades and the Fates,—fables which 
have imprinted themselves in the human memory 
like the signs of the zodiac; his soliform eye and 
his boniform soul; his doctrine of assimilation; his 
doctrine of reminiscence; his clear vision of the 
laws of return, or reaction, which secure instant 
justice throughout the universe, instanced every- 
where, but specially in the doctrine, “ what comes 
from God to us, returns from us to God,” and in 
Socrates’ belief that the laws below are sisters of 
the laws above. 

More striking examples are his moral conclu- 
sions. Plato affirms the coincidence of science 
and virtue; for vice can never know itself and 
virtue, but virtue knows both itself and _ vice. 
The eye attested that justice was best, as long as 
it was profitable ; Plato affirms that it is profitable 
throughout ; that the profit is intrinsic, though the 
just conceal his justice from gods and men; that 
it is better to suffer injustice than to do it; that 


the sinner ought to covet punishment; that the 
WOL. Iv. 6 


§2 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


lie was more hurtful than homieide; and that 
ignorance, or the involuntary lie, was more calami- 
tous than involuntary homicide; that the soul is 
unwillingly deprived of true opinions, and that no 
man sins willingly; that the order or proceeding 
of nature was from the mind to the body, and, 
though a sound body cannot restore an unsound 
mind, yet a good soul can, by its virtue, render the 
body the best possible. The intelligent have a 
right over the ignorant, namely, the right of in- 
structing them. The right punishment of one out 
of tune is to make him play in tune; the fine 
which the good, refusing to govern, ought to pay, 
is, to be governed by a worse man; that his guards 
shall not handle gold and silver, but shall be in- 
structed that there is gold and silver in their souls, 
which will make men willing to give them every 
thing which they need. 

This second sight explains the stress laid on 
geometry. He saw that the globe of earth was 
not more lawful and precise than was the super- 
sensible; that a celestial geometry was in place 
there, as a logic of lines and angles here below; 
that the world was throughout mathematical; the 
proportions are constant of oxygen, azote and lime; 
there is just so much water and slate and magnesia; 
not less are the proportions constant of the mora] 
elements. 


a 


PLATO; NEW READINGS. 83 


This eldest Goethe, hating varnish and false- 
hood, delighted in revealing the real at the base 
of the accidental; in discovering connection, con- 
tinuity and representation everywhere, hating insu- 
lation; and appears like the god of wealth among 
the cabins of vagabonds, opening power and capa- 
bility in everything he touches. Ethical science 
was new and vacant when Plato could write thus: 
—‘“QOf all whose arguments are left to the men 
of the present time, no one has ever yet condemned 
injustice, or praised justice, otherwise than as re- 
spects the repute, honors and emoluments arising 
therefrom ; while, as respects either of them in it- 
self, and subsisting by its own power in the soul 
of the possessor, and concealed both from gods 
and men, no one has yet sufficiently investigated, 
either in poetry or prose writings, — how, namely, 
that injustice is the greatest of all the evils that 
the soul has within it, and justice the greatest 
good.” 

His definition of ideas, as what is  simple,) 
permanent, uniform and self-existent, forever dis-) 
criminating them from the notions of the under-/ 
standing, marks an era in the world. He was 
born to behold the self-evolving power of spirit, 
endless, generator of new ends; a power which is 
the key at once to the centrality and the eva- 
wescence of things. Plato is so centred that he 


84 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


can well spare all his dogmas. Thus the fact of 
knowledge and ideas reveals to him the fact of 
eternity; and the doctrine of reminiscence he 
offers as the most probable particular explication. 
Call that fanciful,—it matters not: the connec- 
tion between our knowledge and the abyss of 
being is still real, and the explication must be 
not less magnificent. 

He has indicated every eminent point in spec- 
ulation. He wrote on the scale of the mind 
itself, so that all things have symmetry in his 
tablet. He put in all the past, without weariness, 
and descended into detail with a courage like 
that he witnessed in nature.. One would say 
that his forerunners had mapped out each a farm 
or a district or an island, in intellectual geog- 
raphy, but that Plato first drew the sphere. He 
domesticates the soul in nature: man is the micro- 
cosm. All the circles of the visible heaven repre- 
sent as many circles in the rational soul. There 
is no lawless particle, and there is nothing casual 
in the action of the human mind. The names of 
things, too, are fatal, following the nature of 
things. All the gods of the Pantheon are, by 
their names, significant of a profound sense. The 
gods are the ideas. Pan is speech, or manifesta- 
tion; Saturn, the contemplative; Jove, the regal 
soul; and Mars, passion. Venus is proportion; 


PLATO; NEW READINGS. 85 


Calliope, the soul of the world; Aglaia, intellec- 
tual illustration. 


These thoughts, in sparkles of light, had ap- 
peared often to pious and to poetic souls; but this 
well-bred, all-knowing Greek geometer comes with 
command, gathers them all up into rank and gra- 
dation, the Euclid of holiness, and marries the 
two parts of nature. Before all men, he saw the 
intellectual values of the moral sentiment. He 
describes his own ideal, when he paints, in Ti- 
meus, a god leading things from disorder into 
order. He kindled a fire so truly in the centre 
that we see the sphere illuminated, and can dis- 
tinguish poles, equator and lines of latitude, 
every arc and node: a theory so averaged, so 
modulated, that you would say the winds of ages 
had swept through this rhythmic structure, and 
not that it was the brief extempore blotting of 
one short-lived scribe. Hence it lias happened 
that a very well-marked class of souls, namely 
those who delight in giving a spiritual, that is, an 
ethico-intellectual expression to every truth, by 
exhibiting an ulterior end which is yet legitimate 
to it,— are said to Platonize. Thus, Michael An- 
gelo is a Platonist in his sonnets: Shakspeare is 
a Platonist when he writes,— 


& 


86 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


“ Nature is made better by no mean, 
But nature makes that mean,” 
or,— 
“He, that can endure 
To follow with allegiance a fallen lord, 
Does conquer him that did his master conquer, 
And earns a place in the story.” 
\ Hamlet is a pure Platonist, and ’tis the magnitude 
_only of Shakspeare’s proper genius that hinders 
him from being classed as the most eminent of 
this school. Swedenborg, throughout his prose 
poem of “ Conjugal Love,” is a Platonist. 

His subtlety commended him to men of thought. 
The secret of his popular success is the moral aim 
which endeared him to mankind. ‘“ Intellect,” he 
said, “is king of heaven and of earth;” but in 
Plato, intellect is always moral. His writings 
have also the sempiternal youth of poetry. For 
their arguments, most of them, might have been 
couched in sonnets: and poetry has never soared 
higher than in the Timzus and the Phedrus. As 
the poet, too, he is only contemplative. He did 
not, like Pythagoras, break himself with an insti- 
tution. All his painting in the Republic must be 
esteemed mythical, with intent to bring out, some- 
times in violent colors, his thought. You cannot 
institute, without peril of charlatanism. 

It was a high scheme, his absolute privilege 
for the best (which, to make emphatic, he ex 


PLATO; NEW READINGS. 87 


pressed by community of women), as the premium 
which he would set on grandeur. ‘There shall 
be exempts of two kinds: first, those who by de- 
merit have put themselves below protection,— 
outlaws; and secondly, those who by eminence of 
nature and desert are out of the reach of your 
rewards. Let such be free of the city and above 
the law. We confide them to themselves; let 
them do with us as they will. Let none presume 
to measure the irregularities of Michael Angelo 
and Socrates by village scales. 

In his eighth book of the Republic, he throws a 
little mathematical dust in our eyes. I am sorry 
to see him, after such noble superiorities, permit- 
ting the lie to governors. Plato plays Providence 
a little with the baser sort, as people allow them- 
selves with their dogs and cats. | 


Senet, ah Pay r BY 


wai - , es 


Fe. Spats + ad far: " ee fate “Ween ‘ae 
i deca tah ie 


~ 
ah F 


n o OF 
ae 


Pe sds a.) 


du: ; ; 
ak gens. A. ay ou th eae 9 


aps, 7 , ; ’ stk 
PR Pe, Bee Me oe wei hy Stn ees pt 
¥ 7 


4 ; : 5 : ie ‘ a oat uv eh 7 
Py ete i< ae. i at ant a nee pens [ 


bi 
et 


‘ i 
ace ne Pa is Poo) ‘ee ae sd aes ie a de ago 


va ez re Sail bh 
aes 4 a vr eats” 





SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 


4 - 


#8T Abe DAOUnIa ee 


id 


«\ * 7 a. 
‘ , he. 4 5 
“ 
bat 


‘ 





TI. 
SWEDENBORG ; OR, THE MYSTIC. 





AMONG eminent persons, those who are most 
dear to men are not of the class which the econo- 
mist calls producers: they have nothing in their 
hands; they have not cultivated corn, nor made 
bread ; they have not led out a colony, nor invented 
a loom. A higher class, in the estimation and) 
love of this city-building market-going race of man- 
kind, are the poets, who, from the intellectual, 
kingdom, feed the thought and imagination with | 
ideas and pictures which raise men out of the 
world of corn and money, and console them for the 
short-comings of the day and the meanness of labor 
and traffic. Then, also, the philosopher has his 
value, who flatters the intellect of this laborer by 
engaging him with subtleties which instruct him in 
new faculties. Others may build cities; he is to 
understand them and keep them in awe. But there 
is a class who lead us into another region, — the 
world of morals or of will. What is singular about 
this region of thought is its claim. Wherever the 


92 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


sentiment of right comes in, it takes precedence of 

every thing else. For other things, I make poetry 
\ of them ; but the moral sentiment makes poetry of 
{ me. 

I have sometimes thought that he would render 
the greatest service to modern criticism, who 
should draw the line of relation that subsists be- 
tween Shakspeare and Swedenborg. The human 
‘mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding intel- 
lect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each 
without the other. ‘The reconciler has not yet ap- 
peared. If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is 
our city of refuge. Yet the instincts presently 
teach that the problem of essence must take pre- 
cedence of all others ;— the questions of Whence ? 
What? and Whither? and the solution of these_ 
must be in a life, and not ina book. A drama or 
poem is a proximate or oblique reply; but Moses, 
Menu, Jesus, work directly on this problem. The 
atmosphere of moral sentiment is a region of grand- 
eur which reduces all material magnificence to 
toys, yet opens to every wretch that has reason the 
doors of the universe. Almost with a fierce haste 
it lays its empire on the man. In the language 
of the Koran, “God said, the heaven and the 
earth and all that is between them, think ye that 
we created them in jest, and that ye shall not re- 
turn tous?” Itis the kingdom of the will, and 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 93 


by inspiring the will, which is the seat of personal. 
ity, seems to convert the universe into a per: 
son ; — 


“The realms of being to no other bow, 
Not only all are thine, but all are Thou.” 


All men are commanded by the saint. The 
Koran makes a distinct class of those who are by 
nature good, and whose goodness has an influence 
on others, and pronounces this class to be the aim 
of creation: the other classes are admitted to the 
feast of being, only as following in the train of 


this. And the Persian poet exclaims to a soul of 
this kind, — 


“Go boldly forth, and feast on being’s banquet; 
Thou art the called, — the rest admitted with thee.” 


The privilege of this caste is an access to the 
secrets and structure of nature by some ¢*higher 
method than by experience. In common parlance, 
what one man is said to learn by experience, a man 
of extraordinary sagacity is said, without expe- 
rience, to divine. The Arabians say, that Abul 
Khain, the mystic, and Abu Ali Seena, the philos- 
opher, conferred together; and, on parting, the 
philosopher said, “ All that he sees, I know ;” and 
the mystic said, “ All that he knows, I see.” If 
one should ask the reason of this intuition, the 
solution would lead us into that property which 


94 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Plato denoted as Reminiscence, and which is im- 
plied by the Bramins in the tenet of Transmigra- 
tion. The soul having been often born, or, as the 
Hindoos say, “travelling the path of existence 
through thousands of births,” having beheld the 
things which are here, those which are in heaven 
and those which are beneath, there is nothing of 
which she has not gained the knowledge: no won- 
der that she is able to recollect, in regard to any 
one thing, what formerly she knew. “For, all 
things in nature being linked and related, and the 
soul having heretofore known all, nothing hinders 
but that any man who has recalled to mind, or ac- 
cording to the common phrase has learned, one 
thing only, should of himself recover all his ancient 
knowledge, and find out again all the rest, if he 
have but courage and faint not in the midst of his 
researches. For inquiry and learning is reminis- 
cence all.” How much more, if he that inquires 
be a holy and godlike soul! For by being as- 
similated to the original soul, by whom and after 
whom all things subsist, the soul of man does then 
easily flow into all things, and all things flow into 
it: they mix; and he is present and sympathetic 
with their structure and law. 

This path is difficult, secret and beset with ter- 
ror. The ancients called it ecstacy or absence, — 
a getting out of their bodies to think. All relig. 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 95 


ious history contains traces of the trance of saints, 
—a beatitude, but without any sign of joy; ear- 
nest, solitary, even sad; “ the flight,’ Plotinus 
ealled it, “of the alone to the alone ;’’ Mvynors, the 
closing of the eyes, — whence our word, J/ystic. 
The trances of Socrates, Plotinus, Porphyry, Beh- 
men, Bunyan, Fox, Pascal, Guyon, Swedenborg, 
will readily come to mind. But what as readily 
comes to mind is the accompaniment of disease. 
This beatitude comes in terror, and with shocks to 
the mind of the receiver. 


“ It o’erinforms the tenement of clay,” 


and drives the man mad; or gives a certain vio- 
lent bias which taints his judgment. In the chief 
examples of religious illumination somewhat mor- 
bid has mingled, in spite of the unquestionable in- 
erease of mental power. Must the highest good 
drag after it a quality which neutralizes and dis- 
eredits it ? — 
“ Indeed, it takes 


From our achievements, when performed at height, 
The pith and marrow of our attribute.” 


Shall we say, that the economical mother disburses 
so much earth and so much fire, by weight and 
meter, to make a man, and will not add a penny- 
weight though a nation is perishing for a leader ? 
Therefore the men of God purchased their science 


\ 


96 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


by folly or pain. If you will have pure carbon, 
carbunele, or diamond, to make the brain transpar- 
ent, the trunk and organs shall be so much the 
grosser: instead of porcelain they are potter’s 
earth, clay, or mud. 

In modern times no such remarkable example of 


-.this introverted mind has occurred as in Kmanuel 
_.Swedenborg, born in Stockholm, in_1688.. This 


man, who appeared to his contemporaries a vision- 
ary and elixir of moonbeams, no doubt led the most 
real life of any man then im the world: and now, 
when the royal and ducal Frederics, Christians and 
Brunswicks of that day have slid into oblivion, he 
begins to spread himself into the minds of thou 
sands. As happens in great men, he seemed, by 
the variety and amount of his powers, to be a com- 
position of several persons, — like the giant fruits 
which are matured in gardens by the union of four 
or five single blossoms. His frame is on a larger 
scale and possesses the advantages of size. As it 
is easier to see the reflection of the great sphere 
in large globes, though defaced by some crack or 
blemish, than in drops of water, so.men_of large 
calibre, though with some eccentricity or madness, 


like Pascal or Newton, help us more than balanced 


mediocre minds. 
His youth and training could not fail to be ex- 
traordinary. Such a boy could not whistle or 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. O97 


dance, but goes grubbing into mines and moun- 
tains, prying into chemistry and optics, physiology, 
mathematics and astronomy, to find images fit for 
the measure of his versatile and capacious brain. 
He was a scholar from a child, and was educated 
at Upsala. At the age of twenty-eight he was 
made Assessor of the Board of Mines by Charles 
XII. In 1716, he left home for four years and 
visited the universities of England, Holland, 
France and Germany. He performed a notable 
feat of engineering in 1718, at the siege of Fred- 
erikshald, by hauling two galleys, five boats and a 
sloop, some fourteen English miles overland, for 
the royal service. In 1721 he journeyed over Eu- 
rope to examine mines and smelting works. He 
published in 1716 his Daedalus Hyperboreus, and 
from this time for the next thirty years was em- 
ployed in the composition and publication of his 
scientific works. With the like force he threw 
himself into theology. In 1743, when he was fifty- 
four years old, what is called his illumination be- 
gan. All his metallurgy and transportation of 
ships overland was absorbed into this ecstasy. He 
ceased to publish any more scientific books, with- 
drew from his practical labors and devoted himself 
to the writing and publication of his voluminous 
theological works, which were printed at his own 


expense, or at that of the Duke of Brunswick or 
VOL. IV. z . 


98 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


other prince, at Dresden, Leipsic, London, or Am: 
sterdam. Later, he resigned his office of Assessor : 
the salary attached to this office continued to be 
paid to him during his life. His duties ‘had 
brought him into intimate acquaintance with King 
Charles XI1., by whom he was much consulted and 
honored. The like favor was continued to him by 
his successor. At the Diet of 1751, Count Hop- 
ken says, the most solid memorials on finance were 
from his pen. in Sweden he appears to have at- 
tracted a marked regard. His rare science and 
practical skill, and the added fame of second sight. 
and extraordinary religious knowledge and gifts, 
drew to him queens, nobles, clergy, shipmasters 
and people about the ports through which he was 
wont to pass in his many voyages. The clergy in- 
terfered a little with the importation and publica- 
tion of his religious works, but he seems to have 
kept the friendship of men in power. He was 
| never married. He had great modesty and gentle- 
ness of bearing. His habits were simple; he lived 
on bread, milk and vegetables ; he lived in a house 
situated in a large garden; he went several times 
to England, where he does not seem to have at- 
tracted any attention whatever from the learned 
or the eminent; and died at London, March 29, 
1772, of apoplexy, in his eighty-fifth year. He is 
described, when in London, as a man of a quiet, 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 99 


elerical habit, not averse to tea and coffee, and 
kind to children. He wore a sword when in full 
velvet dress, and, whenever he walked out, carried 
a gold-headed cane. There is a common portrait 
of him in antique coat and wig, but the face has a 
wandering or vacant air. 

The genius which was to penetrate the science 
of the age with a far more subtle science; to pass 
the bounds of space and time, venture into the dim 
spirit-realm, and attempt to establish a new relig- 
ion in the world, — began its lessons in quarries 
and forges, in the smelting-pot and crucible, in 
ship-yards and dissecting-rooms. No one man is 
perhaps able to judge of the merits of his works on 
so many subjects. One is glad to learn that his 
books on mines and metals are held in the highest 
esteem by those who understand these matters. It 
seems that he anticipated much science of the nine- 
teenth century ; anticipated, in astronomy, the dis- 
covery of the seventh planet, — but, unhappily, not 
also of the eighth ; anticipated the views of mod- 
ern astronomy in regard to the generation of earths 
by the sun; in magnetism, some important experi- 
ments and conclusions of later students ; in chemis- 
try, the atomic theory; in anatomy, the discoveries 
of Schlichting, Monro and Wilson ; and first de- 
monstrated the office of the lungs. His excellent 
English editor magnanimously lays no stress on his 


100 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


discoveries, since he was too great to care to be 
original; and we are to judge, by what he caa 
spare, of what remains. 

A colossal soul, he lies -vast abroad on his times, 
uncomprehended by them, and requires a long fo- 
cal distance to be seen; suggests, as Aristotle, Ba- 
con, Selden, Humboldt, that a certain vastness of 
learning, or guasi omnipresence of the human soul 
in nature, is possible. His superb speculation, as 
from a tower, over nature and arts, without ever 
losing sight of the texture and sequence of things, 
almost realizes his own picture, in the “ Principia,” 
of the original integrity of man. Over and above 
the merit of his particular discoveries, is the capi- 
tal merit of his self-equality. A drop of water has 
the properties of the sea, but cannot exhibit a 
storm. There is beauty of a concert, as well as of 
a flute; strength of a host, as well as of a hero ; 
and, in Swedenborg, those who are best acquainted 
with modern books will most admire the merit of 
mass. One of the missouriums and mastodons of 
literature, he is not to be measured by whole col- 
leges of ordinary scholars. His stalwart presence 
would flutter the gowns of an university. Our 
books are false by being fragmentary; their sen- 
tences are bonmots, and not parts of natural dis- 
course ; childish expressions of surprise or pleasure 
in nature; or, worse, owing a brief notoriety to 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 101 


their petulance, or aversion from the order of na- 
ture ; — being some curiosity or oddity, designedly 
not in harmony with nature and purposely framed 
to excite surprise, as jugglers do by concealing 
their means. But Swedenborg is systematic.and 
respective of the world in every sentence ; all the 
means are orderly given; his faculties work with 
astronomie punctuality, and this admirable writing 
is pure from all pertness or egotism. 

Swedenborg was born into an atmosphere of 
great ideas. Itis hard to say what was his own: 
yet his life was dignified by noblest pictures of the 
universe. The robust Aristotelian method, with 
its breadth and adequateness, shaming our sterile 
and linear logic by its genial radiation, conversant 
with series and degree, with effects and ends, skil- 
ful to discriminate power from form, essence from 
accident, and opening, by its terminology and defi- 
nition, high roads into nature, had trained a race of 
athletic philosophers. Harvey had shown the cir- 
culation of the blood; Gilbert had shown that the 
earth was a magnet; Descartes, taught by Gilbert’s 
magnet, with its vortex, spiral and polarity, had 
filled Europe with the leading thought of vortical 
motion, as the secret of nature. Newton, in the 
year in which Swedenborg was born, published the 
“ Principia,” and established the universal gravity. 
Malpighi, following the high doctrines of Hippo- 


102 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


erates, Leucippus and Lucretius, had given em- 
phasis to the dogma that nature works in leasts, 
—“tota in minimis existit natura.” Unrivalled 
dissectors, Swammerdam, Leuwenhoek, Winslow, 
Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave, had left 
nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in human 
or comparative anatomy: Linnzeus, his contempo- 
rary, was affirming, in his beautiful science, that 
“ Nature is always like herself:” and, lastly, the 
nobility of method, the largest application of prin- 
ciples, had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Chris- 
tian Wolff, in cosmology ; whilst Locke and Gro- 
tius had drawn the moral argument. What was 
left for a genius of the largest calibre but to go 
over their ground and verify and unite? It is easy 
to see, in these minds, the origin of Swedenborg’s 
studies, and the suggestion of his problems. He 
had a capacity to entertain and vivify these volumes 
of thought. Yet the proximity of these geniuses, 
one or other of whom had introduced all his lead- 
ing ideas, makes Swedenborg another example of 
the difficulty, even in a highly fertile genius, of 
proving originality, the first birth and annunciation 
of one of the laws of nature. 

He named his favorite views the doctrine of 
Forms, the doctrine of Series and Degrees, the 
deetrine of Influx, the doctrine of Correspondence. 
His statement of these doctrines deserves to be 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 103 


studied in his books. Not every man can read 
them, but they will reward him who can. His 
theologic works are valuable to illustrate these. 
His writings would be a sufficient library to a 
lonely and athletic student; and the “ Economy 
of the Animal Kingdom” is one of those books 
which, by the sustained dignity of thinking, is an 
honor to the human race. He had studied spars 
and metals to some purpose. His varied and solid 
knowledge makes his style lustrous with points 
and shooting spicule of thought, and resembling 
one of those winter mornings when the air sparkles 
with ecystals. The grandeur of the topics makes 
the grandeur of the style. He was apt. for cosmol- 
ogy, because of that native perception of identity 
which made mere size of no account-to-him. In 
the atom of magnetic iron he saw the quality which 
would generate the spiral motion of sun and planet. 

The thoughts in which he lived were, the univer- 
sality of each law in nature ; the Platonic doctrine 
of the scale or degrees; the version or conversion 
of each into other, and so the correspondence of 
all the parts; the fine secret that little explains 
large, and large, little; the centrality of man in 
nature, and the connection that subsists through- 
out all things: he saw that the human body was 
strictly universal, or an instrument through which 


the soul feeds and is fed by the whole of matter ; 


104. REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


so that he held, in exact antagonism to the skeptics, 
that “the wiser a man is, the more will he be a wor- 
shipper of the Deity.”” In short, he was a believer 
in the Identity-philosophy, which he held not idly, 
as the dreamers of Berlin or Boston, but which he 
experimented with and established through years 
of labor, with the heart and strength of the rudest 
Viking that his rough Sweden ever sent to battle. 
This theory dates fromthe oldest. philosophers, 
and derives perhaps its best illustration from the 
newest. It is this, that Nature iterates her means 
perpetually on successive planes. In the old aphor- 
ism, nature is always self-similar. In the plant, 
the eye or germinative point opens to a leaf, then to 
another leaf, with a power of transforming the leaf 
into radicle, stamen, pistil, petal, bract, sepal, or seed. 
The whole art of the plant is still to repeat leaf on 
leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light, 
moisture and food determining the form it shall 
assume. In the animal, nature makes a vertebra, or 
a spine of vertebre, and helps herself still by a new 
spine, with a limited power of modifying its form,— 
spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic 
anatomist, in our own day, teaches that a snake, 
(being a horizontal line, and man, being an erect 
line, constitute a right angle ; and between the 
lines of this mystical quadrant all animated beings 
find their place: and he assumes the hair-worm, 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 105 


the span-worm, or the snake, as the type or predic- 
tion of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the 
spine, Nature puts out smaller spines, as arms ; at 
the end of the arms, new spines, as hands; at the 
other end, she repeats the process, as legs and feet. 
At the top of the column she puts out another 
spine, which doubles or loops itself over, as a span- 
worm, into a ball, and forms the skull, with extrem. 
ities again: the hands being now the upper jaw, 
the feet the lower jaw, the fingers and toes being 
represented this time by upper and lower teeth. 
This new spine is destined to high uses. It is a 
new man on the shoulders of the last. It can al- 
most shed its trunk and manage to live alone, ac- 
cording to the Platonic idea in the Timeus. 
Within it, on a higher plane, all that was done in 
the trunk repeats itself. Nature recites her lesson 
once more in a higher mood. The mind is a finer 
body, and resumes its functions of feeding, digest- 
ing, absorbing, excluding and generating, in a new 
and ethereal element. Here in the brain is all the 
process of alimentation repeated, in the acquiring, 
comparing, digesting and assimilating of experi- 
ence. Here again is the mystery of generation re- 
peated. In the brain are male and female facul- 
ties ; here is marriage, here is fruit. And_ there is 
no limit to this ascending scale, but series on se- 
ries. Every thing, at the end of one use, is taken 


106 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


up into the next, each series punctually repeating 
every organ and process of the last. We are 
adapted to infinity. We are hard to please, and 
love nothing which ends; and in nature is no end, 
but every thing at the end of one use is lifted into 
a superior, and the ascent of these things climbs 
into demonic and celestial natures. Creative force, 
like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly re- 
peating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, 
in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, 
till it fills earth and heaven with the chant. 
Gravitation, as explained by Newton, is geod, 
but grander when we find chemistry only an exten- 
sion of the law of masses into particles, and that 
the atomic theory shows the action of chemistry to 
be mechanical also. Metaphysics shows us a sort 
of gravitation operative also in the mental phenom- 
ena; and the terrible tabulation of the French sta- 
tists brings every piece of whim and humor to be 
reducible also to exact numerical ratios. If one 
man in twenty thousand, or in thirty thousand, eats 
shoes or marries his grandmother, then in every 
twenty thousand or thirty thousand is found one 
man who eats shoes or marries his grandmother. 
What we call gravitation, and fancy ultimate, is 
one fork of a mightier stream for which we have 
yet no name. Astronomy is excellent; but it must 
come up into life to have its full value, and not re 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 107 


main there in globes and spaces. The globule of 
blood gyrates around its own axis in the human 
veins, as the planet in the sky; and the circles of 
intellect relate to those of the heavens. Each law 
of nature has the like universality; eating, sleep or 
hybernation, rotation, generation, metamorphosis, 
vortical motion, which is seen in eggs as in planets. 
These grand rhymes or returns in nature, — the 
dear, best-known face startling us at every turn, 
under a mask so unexpected that we think it the 
face of a stranger, and carrying up the semblance 
into divine forms, — delighted the prophetic eye of 
Swedenborg; and he must be reckoned a leader in 
that revolution, which, by giving to science an idea, 
has given to an aimless accumulation of experi- 
ments, guidance and form and a beating heart. 

I own with some regret that his printed works 
amount to about fifty stout octavos, his scientific 
works being about half of the whole number; and 
it appears that a mass of manuscript still unedited 
remains in the royal library at Stockholm. The 
scientific works have just now been translated into 
English, in an excellent edition. 

Swedenborg printed these scientific books in the 
ten years from 1734 to 1744, and they remained 
from that time neglected; and now, after their 
century is complete, he has at last found a pupil 
in Mr. Wilkinson, in London, a philosophic critic, 


108 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


with a coequal vigor of understanding and imagi- 
nation comparable only to Lord Bacon’s, who has 
restored his master’s buried books to the day, and 
transferred them, with every advantage, from their 
forgotten Latin into English, to go round the world 
in our commercial and conquering tongue. This 
startling reappearance of Swedenborg, after a hun- 
dred years, in his pupil, is not the least remarkable 
fact in his history. Aided it is said by the munifi- 
cence of Mr. Clissold, and also by his literary slxiil, 
this piece of poetic justice is done. The admirable 
preliminary discourses with which Mr. Wilkinson 
has enriched these* volumes, throw all the contem- 
porary philosophy of England into shade, and leave 
me nothing to say on their proper grounds. 

The “ Animal Kingdom” is a book of wonder- 
ful merits. It was written with the highest end, — 
to put science and the soul, long estranged from 
each other, at one again. It was an anatomist’s 
account of the human body, in the highest style 
of poetry. Nothing can exceed the bold and brill- 
iant treatment of a subject usually so dry and 
repulsive. He saw nature “wreathing through 
an everlasting spiral, with wheels that never dry, 
on axles that never creak,’ and sometimes sought 
‘to uncover those secret recesses where Nature is 
sitting at the fires in the depths of her labora 
tory;” whilst the picture comes recommended by 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 109 


the hard fidelity with which it is based on practical 
anatomy. It is remarkable that this sublime genius 
decides peremptorily for the analytic, against the 
synthetic method ; and, in a book whose genius is 
a daring poetic synthesis, claims to confine himself 
to a rigid experience. 

He knows, if he only, the flowing of nature, and 
how wise was that old answer of Amasis to him 
who bade him drink up the sea, — “ Yes, willingly, )” 
if you will stop the rivers that flow in.” Few 
knew as much about nature and her subtle man- 
ners, or expressed more subtly her goings. He 
thought as large a demand is made on our faith by 
nature, as by miracles. ‘“ He noted that in her 
proceeding from first principles through her several 
subordinations, there was no state through which 
she did not pass, as if her path lay through all 
things.” “For as often as she betakes herself 
upward from visible phenomena, or, in other words, 
withdraws herself inward, she instantly as it were 
disappears, while no one knows what has become 
of her, or whither she is gone: so that it is necessary 
to take science as a guide in pursuing her steps.” 

The pursuing the inquiry under the light of an 
end or final cause gives wonderful animation, a 
sort of personality to the whole writing. This 
book announces his favorite dogmas. The ancient 
doctrine of Hippocrates, that the brain isa gland ; 


1106 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


and of Leucippus, that the atom may be known by 
the mass; or, in Plato, the macrocosm by the 
microcosm; and, in the verses of Lucretius, — 


Ossa videlicet e pauxillis atque minutis 
Ossibus sic et de pauxillis atque minutis 
Visceribus viscus gigni, sanguenque creari 
Sanguinis inter se multis coeuntibus guttis ; 
Ex aurique putat micis consistere posse 
Aurum, et de terris terram concrescere parvis ; 
Tgnibus ex igneis, humorem humoribus esse. 
. Lis. I. 835. 
“ The principle of all things, entrails made 
Of smallest entrails ; bone, of smallest bone ; 
Blood, of small sanguine drops reduced to one ; 
Gold, of small grains ; earth, of small sands compacted ; 
Small drops to water, sparks to fire contracted :” 


and which Malpighi had summed in his maxim 
that “‘ nature exists entire in leasts,’’— is a favorite 
thought of Swedenborg. “It is a constant law of 
the organic body that large, compound, or visible 
forms exist and subsist from smaller, simpier and 
ultimately from invisible forms, which act similarly 
to the larger ones, but more perfectly and more 
universally ; and the least forms so perfectly and 
universally as to involve an idea representative of 
their entire universe.” The unities of each organ 
are so many little organs, homogeneous with their 
compound: the unities of the tongue are little 
tongues; those of the stomach, little stomachs, 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. EE 


those of the heart are little hearts. This fruitful 
idea furnishes a key.to.every.secret. What was 
too small for the eye to detect was read by the 
aggregates; what was too large, by the units. 
There is no end to his application of the thought. 
“ Hunger is an aggregate of very many little hun- 
gers, or losses of blood by the little veins all over 
the body.” It isa key to his theology also. ‘Man 
is a kind of very minute heaven, corresponding to 
the world of spirits and to heaven. Every partic- 
ular idea of man, and every affection, yea, every 
smallest part of his affection, is an image and 
effigy of him. <A spirit may be known from only 
a single thought. God is the grand man.” 

The hardihood and thoroughness of his study of 
nature required a theory of forms-also. ‘“ Forms 
ascend in order from the lowest to the highest. 
The lowest form is angular, or the terrestrial and 
corporeal. The second and next higher form is 
the circular, which is also called the perpetual- 
angular, because the circumference of a circle is 
a perpetual angle. The form above this is the 
spiral, parent and measure of circular forms: its 
diameters are not rectilinear, but variously circular, 
and have a spherical surface for centre ; therefore 
it is called the perpetual-circular. The form above 
this is the vortical, or perpetual-spiral: next, the 
perpetual-vortical, or celestial: last, the perpetual. 
celestial, or spiritual.” ASLO 


dy REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Was it strange that a genius so bold should take 
the last step also, should conceive that he might 
attain the science of all sciences, to unlock the 
meaning of the world? In the first volume of the 
“ Animal Kingdom,” he broaches the subject in a 
remarkable note: —‘ In our doctrine of Representa- 
tions and Correspondences we shall treat of both 
these symbolical and typical resemblances, and of 
the astonishing things which occur, I will not say 
in the living body only, but throughout nature, and 
which correspond so entirely to supreme and spirit- 
ual things that one would swear that the physical 
world was purely symbolical of the spiritual world ; 
insomuch that if we choose to express any natural 
truth in physical and definite vocal terms, and to 
convert these terms only into the corresponding 
and spiritual terms, we shall by this means elicit a 
spiritual truth or theological dogma, in place of 
the physical truth or precept: although no mortal 
would have predicted that any thing of the kind 
could possibly arise by bare literal transposition ; 
inasmuch as the one precept, considered separately 
from the other, appears to have absolutely no 
relation to it. I intend hereafter to communicate 
a number of examples of such correspondences, 
together with a vocabulary containing the terms of 
spiritual things, as well as of the physical things 
for which they are to be substituted. This sym. 
bolism pervades the living body.” 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 112 


The fact thus explicitly stated is implied in al? 
poetry, in allegory, in fable, in the use of emblems 
and in the structure of language. Plato knew it, 
as is evident from his twice bisected line in the 
sixth book of the Republic. Lord Bacon had 
found that truth and nature differed only as seal 
and print ; and he instanced some physical propo- 
sitions, with their translation into a moral or po- 
litical sense. Behmen, and all mystics, imply this 
law in their dark riddle-writing. The poets, in as 
far as they are poets, use it; but it is known to 
them only as the magnet was known for ages, as a 
toy. Swedenborg first put the fact into a detached 
and scientific statement, because it was habitually 
present to him, and never not seen. It was in- 
volved, as we explained already, in the doctrine of 
identity and iteration, because the mental series 
exactly tallies with the material series. It re- 
quired an insight that could rank things in order 
and series ; or rather it required such rightness of 
position that the poles of the eye should coincide 
with the axis of the world. The earth had fed its 
mankind through five or six millenniums, and they 
had sciences, religions, philosophies, and yet had 
failed to see the correspondence of meaning be- 
tween every part and every other part. And, down 
to this hour, literature has no book in which the 
symbolism of things is scientifically opened. One 


VOL. IV. 8 


114 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


would say that as soon as men had the first hint 
that every sensible object, — animal, rock, river, air, 
— nay, space and time, subsists not for itself, nor 
finally to a material end, but as a picture-language 
to tell another story of beings and duties, other 
science would be put by; and a science of such 
grand presage would absorb all faculties: that each 
man would ask of all objects what they mean: 
Why does the horizon hold me fast, with my joy 
and grief, in this centre? Why hear I the same 
sense from countless differing voices, and read one 
never quite expressed fact in endless picture-lan- 
guage? Yet whether it be that these things will 
not be intellectually learned, or that many centu- 
ries must elaborate and compose so rare and opu- 
lent a soul, —there is no comet, rock-stratum, fos- 
‘sil, fish, quadruped, spider, or fungus, that, for 
itself, does not interest more scholars and _ classi- 
fiers than the meaning and upshot of the frame of 
things. 

But Swedenborg was not content with the culi- 
nary use of the world. In his fifty-fourth year 
these thoughts held him fast, and his profound 
mind admitted the perilous opinion, too frequent 
in religious history, that he was an abnormal per- 
son, to whom was granted the privilege of convers- 
ing with angels and spirits; and this ecstasy con- 
nected itself with just this office of explaining the 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 115 


moral import of the sensible world. To a right 
perception, at once broad and minute, of the order 
of nature, he added the comprehension of the 
moral laws in their widest social aspects; but what- 
ever he saw, through some excessive determination 
to form in his constitution, he saw not abstractly, 
but in pictures, heard it in dialogues, constructed 
it in events. When he attempted to announce the 
law most sanely, he was forced to couch it in para- 
ble. 

Modern psychology offers no similar example of 
a deranged balance. The principal powers contin- 
ued to maintain a healthy action, and to a reader 
who can make due allowance in the report for the 
reporter’s peculiarities, the results are still instruc- 
tive, and a more striking testimony to the sublime 
laws he announced than any that balanced dulness 
could afford. He attempts to give some account 
of the modus of the new state, affirming that ‘ his 
presence in the spiritual world is attended with a 
certain separation, but only as to the intellectual 


> and he 


part of his mind, not as to the will part; ’ 
affirms that “he sees, with the internal sight, the 
things that are in another life, more clearly than 
he sees the things which are here in the world.” 
Having adopted the belief that certain books of 
the Old and New Testaments were exact allegories, 


or written in the angelic and eestatic mode, he em 


116 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


ployed his remaining years in extricating from the 
literal, the universal sense. He had borrowed from 
Plato the fine fable of “‘a most ancient people, men 
better than we and dwelling nigher to the gods ;~ 
and Swedenborg added that they used the earth 
symbolically ; that these, when they saw terrestrial 
objects, did not think at all about them, but only 
about those which they signified. The correspond- 
ence between. thoughts and things henceforward oc- 
eupied him. ‘The very organic form resembles 
the end inscribed on it.” A man is in general and 
in particular an organized justice or injustice, sel- 
fishness or gratitude. And the cause of this har- 
mony he assigned in the Arcana: ‘The reason 
why all and single things, in the heavens and on 
earth, are representative, is: because they exist from 
an influx of the Lord, through heaven.” This de- 
sion of exhibiting such correspondences, which, if 
adequately executed, would be the poem of the 
world, in which all history and science would play 
an essential part, was narrowed and defeated by 
the exclusively theologic direction which his in- 
quiries took. His perception of nature is not hu- 
man and universal, but is mystical and Hebraic. 
He fastens each natural object to a theologic no- 
tion ;—a horse signifies carnal understanding ; a 
tree, perception ; the moon, faith; a cat means 
this; an ostrich that; an artichoke this other ;— 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 117 


and poorly tethers every symbol to a several ec- 
clesiastic sense. The slippery Proteus is not so 
easily caught. In nature, each individual symbol 
plays innumerable parts, as each particle of matter 
circulates in turn through every system. ‘The cen- 
tral identity enables any one symbol to express suc- 
cessively all the qualities and shades of real being. 
In the transmission of the heavenly waters, every 
hose fits every hydrant. Nature avenges herself 
speedily on the hard pedantry that would chain her 
waves. $he is no literalist. Every thing must be 
taken genially, and we must be at the top of our 
condition to understand any thing rightly. 

His_ theological bias. thus fatally narrowed. his 
interpretation of nature, and the dictionary of sym- 
bols is yet to be written. But the interpreter 
whom mankind must still expect, will find no pre- 
decessor who has approached so near to the true 
problem. 

Swedenborg styles himself in the title-page of 
his books, “Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ ; ” 
and by force of intellect, and in effect, he is the 
last Father in the Church, and is not likely to have 
a successor. No wonder that his depth of ethical 
wisdom should give him influence as a teacher. 
‘To the withered traditional church, yielding dry 
catechisms, he let in nature again, and the worship- 
per, escaping from the vestry of verbs and texts, is 


118 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


surprised to find himself a party to the whole of 
his religion. His religion thinks for him and is of 
universal application. He turns it on every side ; 
it fits every part of life, interprets and dignifies 
every circumstance. Instead of a religion which 
visited him diplomatically three or four times, — 
when he was born, when he married, when he fell 
sick and when he died, and, for the rest, never in- 
terfered with him,— here was a teaching which 
accompanied him all day, accompanied him even 
into sleep and dreams; into his thinking, and 
showed him through what a long ancestry his 
thoughts descend ; into society, and showed by 
what affinities he was girt to his equals and his 
counterparts ; into natural objects, and showed 
their origin and meaning, what are friendly, and 
what are hurtful; and opened the future world 
by indicating the continuity of the same laws. 
His disciples allege that their intellect is invigor- 
ated by the study of his books. 

There is no such problem for criticism as his 
theological writings, their merits are so command- 
ing, yet such grave deductions must be made. 
Their immense and sandy diffuseness is like the 
prairie or the desert, and their meongruities are 
like the last deliration. He is superfluously explan- 
atory, and his feeling of the ignorance of men, 
strangely exaggerated. Men take truths of this 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 119 


nature very fast. Yet he abounds in assertions, he 
is a rich discoverer, and of things which most im- 
port us to know. His thought dwells in essential 
resemblances, like the resemblance of a house to 
the man who built it. He saw things in their law, 
in likeness of function, not of structure. There is 
an invariable method and order in his delivery of 
his truth, the habitual proceeding of the mind from 
inmost to outmost. What earnestness and weight- 
iness, — his eye never roving, without one swell of 
vanity, or one look to self in any common form of 
literary pride! a theoretic or speculative man, but 
whom no practical man in the universe could affect 
to scorn. Plato is a gownsman; his garment, 
though of purple, and almost sky-woven, is an 
academic robe and hinders action with its volumi- 
nous folds. But this mystic is awful to Cesar. 
Lycurgus himself would bow. 

The moral insight of Swedenborg, the correction 
of popular errors, the announcement of ethical 
laws, take him out of comparison with any other 
modern writer and entitle him to a place, vacant 
for some ages, among the lawgivers of mankind. 
That slow but commanding influence which he has 
acquired, like that of other religious geniuses, must 
be excessive also, and have its tides, before it sub- 
sides into a permanent amount. Of course what is 
real and universal cannot be confined to the circle 


120 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


of those who sympathize strictly with his genius, 
but will pass forth into the common stock of wise 
and just thinking. The world has a sure chemistry, 
by which it extracts what is excellent in its chil- 
dren and lets fall the infirmities and limitations of 
the grandest mind. . 

That metempsychosis which is familiar in the 
old mythology of the Greeks, collected in Ovid 
and in the Indian Transmigration, and is there 
objective, or really takes place in bodies by alien 
will,— in Swedenborg’s mind has a more philo- 
sophie character. It is subjective, or depends 
entirely upon the thought of the person. All 
things in the universe arrange themselves to each 
person anew, according to his ruling love. Man 
is such as his affection and thought are. Man is 
man by virtue of willing, not by virtue of know- 
ing and understanding. As he is, so he sees. 
The marriages of the world are broken up. In- 
teriors associate all in the spiritual world. What- 
ever the angels looked upon was to them celestial. 
Each Satan appears to himself a man; to those 
as bad as he, a comely man; to the purified, a 
heap of carrion. Nothing can. resist states: every 
thing gravitates: like will to like: what we call 
poetic justice takes effect on the spot. We have 
come into a world which is a living poem. Every 
thing isas Iam. JBird and beast is not bird and 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 121 


beast, but emanation and effluvia of the minds 
and wills of men there present. Every one makes 
his own house and state. The ghosts are tor- 
mented with the fear of death and cannot remem- 
ber that they have died. |They who are in evil | 
and falsehood. are afraid of all others.| Such as 
have deprived themselves of charity, wander and 
flee: the societies which they approach discover 
their quality and drive them away. The covet- 
ous seem to themselves to be abiding in cells 
where their money is deposited, and these to be 
infested with mice. They who place merit in 
good works seem to themselves to cut wood. “I 
asked such, if they were not wearied? They re- 
plied, that they have not yet done work enough 
to merit heaven.” 

He delivers golden sayings which express with 
singular beauty the ethical laws; as when he 
uttered that famed sentence, that “In heaven the 
angels are advancing continually to the spring- 
time of their youth, so that the oldest angel ap- 


29 


pears the youngest:” ‘The more angels, the 
more room:” “* The perfection of man is the love 
of use:” “ Man, in his perfect form, is heaven: ”’ 
“ What is from Him, is Him:” “ Ends always 
ascend as nature descends.” And the truly poetic 
account of the writing in the inmost heaven, which, 


as it consists of inflexions according to the form 


192 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


of heaven, can be read without instruction. He 
almost justifies his claim to preternatural vision, 
by strange insights of the structure of the human 
body and mind. “It is never permitted to any 
one, in heaven, to stand behind another and look 
at the back of his head; for then the influx which 
is from the Lord is disturbed.” The angels, from 
the sound of the voice, know a man’s love; from 
the articulation of the sound, his wisdom; and 
from the sense of the words, his science. 

In the “Conjugal Love,” he has unfolded the 
science of marriage. Of this book one would say 
that with the highest elements it has failed of 
success. It came near to be the Hymn of Love, 
which Plato attempted in the “ Banquet;” the 
love, which, Dante says, Casella sang among the 
angels in Paradise; and which, as rightly cele- 
brated, in its genesis, fruition and effect, might 
well entrance the souls, as it would lay open the 
genesis of all institutions, customs and manners. 
The book had been grand if the Hebraism had 
been omitted and the law stated without Gothi- 
cism, as ethics, and with that scope for ascension 
of state which the nature of things requires. It 
is a fine Platonic development of the science of 
marriage; teaching that sex is universal, and 
not local; virility in the male qualifying every 
organ, act, and thought; and the feminine in 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 123 


woman. Therefore in the real or spiritual world 
the nuptial union is not momentary, but inces- 
sant and total; and chastity not a local, but a 
universal virtue; unchastity being discovered as 
much in the trading, or planting, or speaking, or 
philosophizing, as in generation; and that, though 
the virgins he saw in heaven were beautiful, the 
Wives were incomparably more beautiful, and went 
on increasing in beauty evermore. 

Yet Swedenborg, after his mode, pinned his\ 


theory to a temporary form. He exaggerates the \ 


circumstance of marriage; and though he finds 
false marriages on earth, fancies a wiser choice in 
heaven. But of progressive souls, all loves and 
friendships are momentary. Do you love me? | 
means, Do you see the same truth? If you do, 
we are happy with the same happiness: but pres- 
ently one of us passes into the perception of new 
truth ;— we are divorced, and no tension in na- 
ture can hold us to each other. I know how deli- 
cious is this cup of love,— I existing for you, you 
existing for me; but it is a child’s clinging to his 
toy; an attempt to eternize the fireside and nup- 
tial chamber ; to keep the picture-alphabet through 
which our first lessons are prettily conveyed. 
The Eden of God is bare and grand: like the out- 
door landscape remembered from the evening’ fire- 
side, it seems cold and desolate whilst you cower 


124 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


over the coals, but once abroad again, we pity 
those who can forego the magnificence of nature 
for candle-light and cards. Perhaps the true 
subject of the “ Conjugal Love” is Conversation, 
whose laws are profoundly set forth. It is false, 
if literally applied to marriage. For God is the 
bride or bridegroom of the soul. {Heaven is not 
/ the pairing of two, but the communion of all souls, 
We meet, and dwell an instant under the temple 
of one thought, and part, as though we parted 
not, to join another thought in other fellowships 
of joy. So far from there being anything divine 
in the low and proprietary sense of Do you love 
me? it is only when you leave and lose me by 
casting yourself on a sentiment which is_ higher 
than both of us, that I draw near and find myself 
at your side; and I am repelled if you fix your 
eye on me and demand love. In fact, in the spir- 
itual world we change sexes every moment. You 
love the worth in me; then [ am your husband: 
but it is not me, but the worth, that fixes the 
love; and that worth is a drop of the ocean of 
worth that is beyond me. Meantime I adore the 
greater worth in another, and so become his wife. 
He aspires to a higher worth in another spirit, 
and is wife or receiver of that influence. 


Whether from a self-inquisitorial habit that he 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 125 


erew into from jealousy of the sins to which men 
of thought are liable, he has acquired, in disentan- 
gling and demonstrating that particular form of 
moral disease, an acumen which no conscience can 
resist. I refer to his feeling of the profanation of 
thinking to what is good, “ from scientifies.” ‘‘ To 


reason about faith, is to doubt and deny.” He 7 


was painfully alive to the difference between know- 
ing and doing, and this sensibility is incessantly 
expressed. Philosophers are, therefore, vipers, 
cockatrices, asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying 
serpents ; literary men are conjurors and charla- 
tans. | 

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that 
here we find the seat of his own pain. Possibly 
Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted fac- 
ulties. Success, or a 


— 


depend on on a happy adjustment: of heart and brain fi ; 
on a due proportion, hard to hit, of. ‘moral and 
mental power, which perhaps obeys the law of | 


those chemical ratios which make a proportion in 


volumes necessary to combination, as when gases ! 


will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any 
rate. It is hard to carry a full cup ; and this man, 
profusely endowed in heart and mind, early fell 
into dangerous discord with himself, In his Ani- 
mal Kingdom he surprised us by declaring that he 
loved analysis, and ne* synthesis; and now, after 


a_fortunate genius, seems to ’ 


126 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


his fiftieth year, he falls into jealousy of his intel: 
lect ; and though aware that truth is not solitary 
nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever mix 
and marry, he makes war_on his mind, takes the 
part of the conscience against it, and, on all occa- 
sions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence 
is instantly avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love 
is unlovely, when truth, the half part of heaven, 
is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men 
of talent leads to satire and destroys the judgment. 
He is wise, but wise in his own despite. There is 
an air of infinite grief and the sound of wailing all 
over and through this lurid universe. A vampyre 
sits in the seat of the prophet and turns with 
gloomy appetite to the images of pain. Indeed, a 
bird does not more readily weave its nest, or a 
mole bore into the ground, than this seer of the 
souls substructs a new hell and pit, each more 
abominable than the last, round every new crew 
of offenders. He was let down through a column 
that seemed of brass, but it was formed of angelic 
spirits, that he might descend safely amongst the 
unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls and 
hear there, for a long continuance, their lamenta- 
tions: he saw their tormentors, who increase and 
strain pangs to infinity; he saw the hell of the 
jugglers, the hell of the assassins, the hell of the 
lascivious; the hell of robbers, who kill and boil 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 127 


men; the infernal Jtun\of the deceitful; the excre- 
mentitious hells ; the hell of the revengeful, whose 
faces resembled a round, broad cake, and their 
arms rotate like a wheel. Except Rabelais and 2 / 
Dean Swift nobody ever had such science of filth } 
and. corruption. 

These books should be used with caution. It is 
dangerous to sculpture these evanescing images of 
thought. True in transition, they become false if 
fixed. It»requires, for his just apprehension, al-| 
most a genius equal to his own. But when his 
visions become the stereotyped language of multi-\ 
tudes of persons of all degrees of age and capacity, 
they are perverted. The wise people of the Greek 
race were accustomed to lead the most intelligent 
and virtuous young men, as part of their education, 
through the Eleusinian mysteries, wherein, with 
much pomp and graduation, the highest truths 
known to ancient wisdom were taught. An ar- 
dent and contemplative young man, at eighteen or 
twenty years, might read once these books of 
Swedenborg, these mysteries of love and conscience, 
and then throw them aside for ever. Genius is 
ever haunted by similar dreams, when the hells 
and the heavens are opened to it. But these pic- 
tures are to be held as mystical, that is, as a quite 
arbitrary and accidental picture of the truth, — not 
as the truth. Any other symbol would be as good ; 
then this is safely seen. 


128 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Swedenborg’s system of the world wants central 
spontaneity : it is dynamic, not vital, and lacks 
power to generate life. There is no individual in 
it. The universe is a gigantic crystal, all whose 
atoms and lamin lie in uninterrupted order and 
with unbroken unity, but cold and still. What 
seems an individual and a will, is none. There is 
an immense chain of intermediation, extending from 
centre to extremes, which bereaves every agency 
of all freedom and character. The universe, in his 
poem, suffers under a magnetic sleep, and only re- 
flects the mind of the magnetizer. Every thought 
comes into each mind. by influence from a society 
of spirits that surround it, and into these from a 
higher society, and so on. All his types mean the 
same few things. All his figures speak one speech. 
All his interlocutors Swedenborgize. Be they who 
they may, to this complexion must they come at 
last. This Charon ferries them all over in his boat ; 
kings, counsellors, cavaliers, doctors, Sir Isaac New- 
ton, Sir Hans Sloane, King George II., Mahomet, 
or whomsoever, and all gather one grimness of hue 
and style. Only when Cicero comes by, our gentle 
seer sticks a little at saying he talked with Cicero, 
and with a touch of human relenting remarks, “ one 
whom it was given me to believe was Cicero” ; and 
when the sot disunt Roman opens his mouth, 
Rome and eloquence have ebbed away, — it is plain 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 129 


theologic Swedenborg like the rest. His heavens 
and hells are dull; fault of want of individualism. 
The thousand -fold relation of men is not there. 
The interest that attaches in nature to each man, 
because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by his 
right ; because he defies all dogmatizing and classi- 
fication, so many allowances and contingences and 
futurities are to be taken into account; strong by 
his vices, often paralyzed by his virtues ;— sinks 
into entire sympathy with his society. This want 
reacts to the centre of the system. Though the 
agency of “the Lord” is in every line referred to 
by name, it never becomes alive. There is no lustre 
in that eye which gazes from the centre and which 
should vivify the immense dependency of beings. 
The vice of Swedenborg’s mind. is its theologic 
determination. Nothing with him has the liberal- 
ity of universal wisdom, but we are always in a 
church. That Hebrew muse, which taught the lore 
of right and wrong to men, had the same excess of 
influence for him it has had for the nations. The 
mode, as well as the essence, was sacred. Palestine 
is ever the more valuable as a chapter in universal 
\ustory, and ever the less an available element in 
education. The genius of Swedenborg, largest of 
all modern souls in this department of thought, 
wasted itself in the endeavor to reanimate and con- 


serve what had already arrived at its natural term, 
VOL. IV. 9 


130 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


and, in the great secular Providence, was retiring 
from its prominence, before Western modes of 
thought and expression. Swedenborg and Behmen 
both failed by attaching themselves to the Christian 
_ symbol, instead of to the moral sentiment, which 
carries innumerable christianities, humanities, di- 
vinities, in its bosom. 

The excess of influence shows itself in the incon- 
gruous importation of a foreign rhetoric. ‘ What 
have I to do’ asks the impatient reader, ‘ with Jas- 
per and sardonyx, beryl and chalcedony ; what with 
arks and passovers, ephahs and ephods; what with 
lepers and emerods ; what with heave-offerings and 
unleavened bread, chariots of fire, dragons crowned 
and horned, behemoth and unicorn? Good for 
Orientals, theseare nothing to me. The more learn- 
ing you bring to explain them, the more glaring 
the impertinence. The more coherent and elabo- 
rate the system, the less I like it. I say, with the 
Spartan, “ Why do you speak so much to the pur- 
pose, of that which is nothing to the purpose?” 
My learning is such as God gave me in my birth 
and habit, in the delight and study of my eyes and 
not of another man’s. Of all absurdities, this of 
some foreigner proposing to take away my rhetoric 
and substitute his own, and amuse me with peli- 
ean and stork, instead of thrush and robin ; palm- 
trees and shittim-wood, instead of sassafras and 
hickory, — seems the most needless.’ 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 181 


Locke said, “ God, when he makes the prophet,\” 
does not unmake-the man.” Swedenborg’s history 
points the remark. The parish disputes in the 
Swedish church between the friends and foes of 
Luther and Melancthon, concerning “ faith alone v 
and ‘works alone,” intrude themselves into his 
speculations upon the economy of the universe, and 
of the celestial societies. The Lutheran bishop’s 
son, for whom the heavens are opened, so that he 
sees with eyes and in the richest symbolic forms 
the awful truth of things, and utters again in his 
books, as under a heavenly mandate, the indisputa- 
ble secrets of moral nature, — with all these grand- 
eurs resting upon him, remains the Lutheran bish- 
op’s son; his judgments are those of a Swedish 
polemic, and his vast enlargements purchased by 
adamantine limitations. He carries his controver- 
sial memory with him in his visits to the souls. He 
is like Michael Angelo, who, in his frescoes, put the 
cardinal who had offended him to roast under a 
mountain of devils; or like Dante, who avenged, in 
vindictive melodies, all his private wrongs; or per- 
haps still more like Montaigne’s parish priest, who, 
if a hail-storm passes over the village, thinks the 
day of doom is come, and the cannibals already 
have got the pip. Swedenborg confounds us not 
less with the pains of Melancthon and Luther and 
Wolfius, and his own books, which he advertises 
among the angels. 


132 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Under the same theologic cramp, many of his 
dogmas are bound. His cardinal position in 
morals is that evils should be shunned as sins. 
But he does not know what evil is, or what good 
is, who thinks any ground remains to be occupied, 
alter saying that evil is to be shunned as evil. I 
doubt not he was led by the desire to insert the 
element of personality of Deity. But nothing is 
added. One man, you say, dreads erysipelas, — 
show him that this dread ‘is evil: or, one dreads 
hell, — show him that dread is evil. He who 
‘loves goodness, harbors angels, reveres reverence 
and lives with God. The less we have to do with 
our sins the better. No man can afford to waste 
his moments in compunctions. “That is active 
duty,” say the Hindoos, “which is not for our 
bondage ; that is knowledge, which is for our lib- 
eration: all other duty is good only unto weari- 
ness.” | 

Another dogma, growing out of this pernicious 
theologic limitation, is his Inferno. Swedenborg 
has devils. Evil, according to old philosophers, 
is good in the making. That pure malignity can 
exist is the extreme proposition of unbelief. It 
is not to be entertained by a rational agent; it is 
atheism; it is the last profanation. Euripides 
rightly said, — 

“Goodness and being in the gods are one ; 
He who imputes ill to them makes them none.” 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 133 


To what a painful perversion had Gothic theology 
arrived, that Swedenborg admitted no conversion 
for evil spirits! But the divine effort is never 
relaxed ; the carrion in the sun will convert itself 
to grass and flowers ; and man, though in brothels, 
or jails, or on gibbets, is on his way to all that is 
good and true. Burns, with the wild humor of his 
apostrophe to poor “ auld Nickie Ben,” 


“O wad ye tak a thought, and mend !” 


has the advantage of the vindictive theologian. 
Every thing is superficial and—perishes..but love _ 
and truth only. The largest is always the truest 
‘sentiment, and we feel the more generous spirit 
of the Indian Vishnu, — ‘I am the same to all 
mankind. There is not one who is worthy of my 
love or hatred. They who serve me with adora- 
tion, —I am in them, and they in me. If one 
whose ways are altogether evil serve me alone, he 
is as respectable as the just man; he is altogether 
well employed; he soon becometh of a virtuous 
spirit and obtaineth eternal happiness.” 

For the anomalous pretension of Revelations 
of the other world, —only his probity and genius 
ean entitle it to any serious regard. His revela- 
tions destroy their credit by running into detail. 
If a man say that the Holy Ghost has informed 
him that the Last Judgment (or the last of the 


134 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


judgments), took place in 1757; or that the 
Dutch, in the other world, live in a heaven by 
themselves, and the English in a heaven by them- 
selves; I reply that the Spirit which is holy is 
reserved, taciturn, and deals in laws. The rumors 
of ghosts and hobgoblins gossip and tell fortunes. 
The teachings of the high Spirit are abstemious, 
and, in regard to particulars, negative. Socrates’s 
Genius did not advise him to act or to find, but if 
he purposed to do somewhat not advantageous, it 
dissuaded him. ‘* What God is,” he said, “I know 
not; what he is not, I know.” The Hindoos have 
denominated the Supreme Being, the “ Internal 
Check.” The illuminated Quakers explained their 
Light, not as somewhat which leads to any action, 
but it appears as an obstruction to any thing unfit. 
But the right examples are private experiences, 
which are absolutely at one on this point. Strictly 
speaking, Swedenborg’s revelation is a confounding 
_ of planes, — a capital offence in so learned a cate- 
 gorist.. This is to carry the law of surface into 
the plane of substance, to carry individualism and 
its fopperies into the realm of essences and gen- 
erals, — which is dislocation and chaos. 
_” The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. 
No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an 
early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the 
fears of mortals. We should have listened on our 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 135 


knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, 
had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the 
celestial currents and could hint to human ears the 
scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul. 
But it is certain that it must tally with what is best 
in nature. It must. not be inferior in tone to the 
already known works of the artist who sculptures 
the globes of the firmament and writes the moral 
law. It must be fresher than rainbows, stabler 
than mountains, agreeing with flowers, with tides 
and the rising and setting of autumnal stars. 
Melodious poets shall be hoarse as street ballads 
when once the penetrating key-note of nature and 
spirit is sounded, — the earth-beat, sea-beat, heart- 
beat, which makes the tune to which the sun rolls, 
and the globule of blood, and the sap of trees. _, 
In this mood we hear the rumor that the seer 
has arrived, and his tale is told. But there is no 
beauty, no heaven: for angels, goblins. The sad 
muse loves night and death and the pit. His In- 
ferno is mesmeric. His spiritual world bears the 
same relation to the generosities and joys of truth 
of which human souls have already made us cogni- 
zant, as a man’s bad dreams bear to his ideal life. 
It is indeed very like, in its endless power of lurid 
pictures, to the phenomena of dreaming, which 
nightly turns many an honest gentleman, benevo- 
lent but dyspeptic, into a wretch, skulking like a 


136 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


dog about the outer yards and kennels of creation. 
When he mounts into the heaven, I do not hear 
its language. A man should not tell me that he 
has walked among the angels; his proof is that his 
eloquence makes me one. Shall the archangels be 
less majestic and sweet than the figures that have 
actually walked the earth? These angels that 
Swedenborg paints give us no very high idea of 
their discipline and culture: they are all country 
parsons: their heaven is a féte champétre, an 
evangelical picnic, or French distribution of prizes 
to virtuous peasants. Strange, scholastic, didactic, 
passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of 
souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits 
doleful hells as a stratum of chalk or hornblende ! 
He has no sympathy. He goes up and down the 
world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold- 
headed cane and peruke, and with nonchalance 
and the air of a referee, distributes souls. The 
warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world 
is to him a grammar of hieroglyphs, or an emblem- 
atic freemason’s procession. How different is 
Jacob Behmen! he is tremulous with emotion and 
listens awe-struck, with the gentlest humanity, to 
the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when 
he asserts that, “‘in some sort, love is greater than 
God,” his heart beats so high that the thumping 
against his leathern coat is audible across the cen- 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. Lae 


turies. “Tis a great difference. Behmen is health- 
ily and beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mys- 
tical narrowness and incommunicableness. Swed- 
enborg is disagreeably wise, and with all his accu- 
mulated gifts, paralyzes and repels. 

It is the best sign of a great nature that it opens 
a foreground, and, like the breath of morning 
landscapes, invites us onward. Swedenborg is re- 
trospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock 
and shroud. Some minds are for ever restrained 
from descending into nature; others are for ever 
prevented from ascending out of it. With a force 
of many men, he could never break the umbilical 
cord which held him to nature, and he did not rise 
to the platform of pure genius. 

It is remarkable that this man, who, by his _per- 
ception of symbols, saw the poetic construction of 
things and the primary relation of mind to matter, 
remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of 
poetic expression, which that perception creates. 
He knew the grammar and rudiments of the 
Mother-Tongue, — how could he not read off one 
strain into music? Was he like Saadi, who, in 
his vision, designed to fill his lap with the celestial 
flowers, as presents for his friends; but the fra- 
grance of the roses so intoxicated him that the 
skirt dropped from his hands? or is reporting 2 
breach of the manne.s of that heavenly society ? 


138 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


or was it that he saw the vision intellectually, and 
hence that chiding of the intellectual that pervades 
his books? Be it as it may, his books have no 
melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the 
dead prosaic level. In his profuse and accurate 
imagery is no pleasure, for there is no beauty. 
We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape. No 
bird ever sang in all these gardens of the dead. 
The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a 
mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice 
in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning. I 
think, sometimes, he will not be read longer. His 
great name will turn a sentence. His books have 
become a monument. His laurel so largely mixed 
with cypress, a charnel-breath so mingles with the 
temple incense, that boys and maids will shun the 
spot. 

Yet in this immolation of genius and fame at 
the shrine of conscience, is a merit sublime beyond 
praise. He lived to purpose: he gave a verdict. 
He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul 
must cling in all this labyrinth of nature. Many 
opinions conflict as to the true centre. In the 
shipwreck, some cling to running rigging, some to 
cask and barrel, some to spars, some to mast ; the 
pilot chooses with science, —I plant myself here; 
all will sink before this; ‘“‘he comes to land who 
sails with me.” Do not rely on heavenly favor, or 
on compassion to folly, or on prudence, on common 


SWEDENBORG; OR, THE MYSTIC. 139 


sense, the old usage and main chance of men: noth- 
ing can keep you, —not fate, nor health, nor ad- 
mirable intellect ; none can keep you, but rectitude 
only, rectitude for ever and ever! And with a 
tenacity that never swerved in all his studies, in- 
ventions, dreams, he adheres to this brave choice. 
I think of him as of some transmigrating votary of 
Indian legend, who says ‘Though I be dog, or 
jackal, or pismire, in the last rudiments of nature, 
under what integument or ferocity, I cleave to 
right, as the sure ladder that leads up to man and 
to God.’ 

Swedenborg has rendered a double service to 
mankind, which is now only beginning to be known. 
By the science of experiment and use, he made his 
first steps: he observed and published the laws of 
nature ; and ascending by just degrees from events 
to their summits and causes, he was fired with piety 
at the harmonies he felt, and abandoned himself to 
his joy and worship. This was his first service. If 
the glory was too bright for his eyes to bear, if he 
staggered under the trance of delight, the more ex- 
cellent is the spectacle he saw, the realities of being 
which beam and blaze through him, and which no in- 
firmities of the prophet are suffered to obscure ; 
and he renders a second passive service to men, 
not less than the first, perhaps, in the great circle 
of being, — and, in the retributions of spiritual na- 
ture, not less glorious or less beautiful to himself. 















ee fe pte 
wi i Lae Py, a ~ 
Fe ae + 
. « bry q ¢ t * 
el ° AIDE ¢'s {san 9 al 4 a Band: 
“fis J)? ir Ge Ast vw } 








| ee 
1 
a 


eae 
7 


ol 
- 
= 


es 
Sp sansa 
A 
§ 


Te <f 
ee 


re 
a 





MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 


Ve oe 


oe 7 
oe de ran. ae i ft} a i : 
a Ni? Sohe 28 ry 





IV. | 
MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 





Every fact is related on one side to sensation, 
and on the other to morals. The game of thought 
is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to 
find the other: given the upper, to find the under 
side. Nothing so thin but has these two faces, and 
when the observer has seen the obverse, he turns it 
over to see the reverse. Life is a pitching of this 
penny, — heads or tails. We never tire of this 
game, because there is still a slight shudder of as- 
tonishment at the exhibition of the other face, at 
the contrast of the two faces. A man is flushed 
with success, and bethinks himself what this good 
luck signifies. He drives his bargain in the street ; 
but it occurs that he also is bought and sold. He 
sees the beauty of a human face, and searches the 
cause of that beauty, which must be more beauti- 
ful. He builds his fortunes, maintains the laws, 
cherishes his children ; but he asks himself, Why ? 
and whereto? This head and this tail are called, 
in the language of philosophy, Infinite and Finite ; 


144 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Relative and Absolute; Apparent and Real; and 
many fine names beside. 

Each man_is-born with a predisposition to one 
or the other of these sides of nature ; and it will 
easily happen that men will be found devoted to 
one or the other. One class has the perception of 
difference, and is conversant with facts and sur- 
faces, cities and persons, and the bringing certain 
things to pass;— the men of talent and_action. 
Another class have the perception of identity, and 
are men of faith and philosophy, men of genius. 

Each of these riders drives too fast. Plotinus 
believes only in philosophers; Fenelon, in saints ; 
Pindar and Byron, in poets. Read the haughty 
language in which Plato and the Platonists speak 
of all men who are not devoted to their own shin- 
ing abstractions: other men are rats and mice. 
The literary class is usually proud and exclusive. 
“The correspondence of Pope and Swift describes 
mankind around them as monsters; and that of 
Goethe and Schiller, in our own time, is scarcely 
more kind. 

It is easy to see how this arrogance comes. The 
genius is a genius by the first look he casts on any 
object. Is his eye creative? Does he not rest in 
angles and colors, but beholds the design ?— he will 
presently undervalue the actual object. In power- 
ful moments, his thought has dissolved the works 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 145 


of art and nature into their causes, so that the 
works appear heavy and faulty. He has a concep- 
tion of beauty which the sculptor cannot embody. 
Picture, statue, temple, railroad, steam-engine, ex- 
isted first in an artist’s mind, without flaw, mistake, 
or friction, which impair the executed models. So 
did the Church, the State, college, court, social cir- 
ele, and all the institutions. It is not strange that 
these men, remembering what they have seen and 
hoped of ideas, should affirm disdainfully the supe- 
riority of ideas. Having at some time seen that 
_ the happy soul will carry all the arts in power, they 
say, Why cumber ourselves with superfluous reali- 
zations? and like dreaming beggars they assume to 
speak and act as if these values were already sub- 
stantiated. 

On the other part, the men of toil and trade 
and luxury,—the animal world, including the 
animal in the philosopher and poet also, and the 
practical world, including the painful drudgeries 
which are never excused to philosopher or poet 
any more than to the rest, — weigh heavily on the 
other side. The trade in our streets believes in 
no metaphysical causes, thinks nothing of the 
force which necessitated traders and a trading 
planet to exist: no, but sticks to cotton, sugar, 
wool and salt. The ward meetings, on election 
days, are not softened by any misgiving of the 


VOL. IV. 10 


146 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


value of these ballotings. Hot life is streaming 
ina single direction. To the men of this world, 
to the animal strength and spirits, to the men of 
practical power, whilst immersed in it, the man 
of ideas appears out of his reason. They alone 
have reason. 

Things always bring their own philosophy with 
them, that is, prudence. No man acquires prop- 
erty without acquiring with it a little arithmetic 
also. In England, the richest country that ever 
existed, property stands for more, compared with 
personal ability, than in any other. After dinner, 
a man believes less, denies more: verities have 
lost some charm. After dinner, arithmetic is the 
only science: ideas are disturbing, incendiary, 
follies of young men, repudiated by the solid por- 
tion of society: and a man comes to be valued 
by his athletic and animal qualities. Spence re- 
‘lates that Mr. Pope was with Sir Godfrey Kneller 
one day, when his nephew, a Guinea trader, came 
in. ‘“* Nephew,” said Sir Godfrey, “you have the 
honor of seeing the two greatest men in the 
world.” ©“ I don’t know how great men you may 
be,” said the Guinea man, “but I don’t like your 
looks. I have often bought a man much better 
than both of you, all muscles and bones, for ten 
guineas.” Thus the men of the senses revenge 
themselves_on_the professors and repay scorn for 


¢ 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 147 


scorn. The first had leaped to conclusions not 
yet ripe, and say more than is true; the others 
make themselves merry with the philosopher, and 
weigh man by the pound. They believe that mus- 
tard bites the tongue, that pepper is hot, friction- 
matches incendiary, revolvers are to be avoided, 
and suspenders hold up pantaloons; that there is | 
much sentiment in a chest of tea; and a man will 
be eloquent, if you give him good wine. Are you 
tender and scrupulous, — you must eat more mince- 
pie. They hold that Luther had milk in him 
when he said, — 
“Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weiber, Gesang, 
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang ;”” — 

and when he advised a young’ scholar, perplexed 
with fore-ordination and free-will, to get well 
drunk. ‘The nerves,” says Cabanis, “they are 
the man.” My neighbor, a jolly farmer, in the 
tavern bar-room, thinks that the use of money is 
sure and speedy spending. For his part, he says, 
he puts his down his neck and gets the good of it. 

The inconvenience of this way of thinking is 
that it runs into indifferentism and then into dis- 
gust. Life is eating us up. We shall be fables 
presently. Keep cool: it will be all one a hun- 
dred years hence. Life’s well enough, but we 
shall be glad to get out of it, and they will all 
be glad to have us. Why should we fret and 


148 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


drudge? Our meat will taste to-morrow as it 
did yesterday, and we may at last have had 
enough of it. “Ah,” said my languid gentleman 
at Oxford, “there’s nothing new or true,—and no 
matter.” 

With a little more bitterness, the cynic moans; 
our life is like an ass led to market by a bundle 
of hay being carried before him; he sees nothing 
but the bundle of hay. ‘“ There is so much 
trouble in coming into the world,” said Lord 
Bolingbroke, “and so much more, as well as 
meanness, in going out of it, that ’tis hardly 
worth while to be here at all.” I knew a philoso- 
pher of this kidney who was accustomed briefly 
to sum up his experience of human nature in say- 
ing, ‘Mankind is a damned rascal:” and the 
natural corollary is pretty sure to follow, — ‘The 
world lives by humbug, and so will I.’ 

The abstractionist and the materialist thus mu- 
tually exasperating each other, and the scoffer 
expressing the worst of materialism, there arises 
a third party to occupy the middle ground be- 
tween these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds 
both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to 
plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. 
He will not go beyond his card. He sees the 
one-sidedness of these men of the street; he will 
not be a Gibeonite ; he stands for the intellectual 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 149 


faculties, a cool head and whatever serves to keep 
it cool; no unadvised industry, no unrewarded 
self-devotion, no loss of the brains in toil. Am I 
an ox, or a dray? — You are both in extremes, he 
says. You that will have all solid, and a world 
of pig-lead, deceive yourselves grossly. You be- 
lieve yourselves rooted and grounded on adamant ; 
and yet, if we uncover the last facts of our knowl- 
edge, you are spinning like bubbles in a river, 
you know not whither or whence, and you are 
bottomed and capped and wrapped in delusions. 
Neither will he be betrayed to a book and wrapped — 
ina gown. ‘The studious class are their own vic- 
tims ; they are thin and pale, their feet are cold, 
their heads are hot, the night is without sleep, 
the day a fear of interruption, — pallor, squalor, | 
hunger and egotism. If you come near them and 
see what conceits they entertain,—they are ab- 
stractionists, and spend their days and nights in 
dreaming some dream; in expecting the homage 
of society to some precious scheme, built on a truth, 
but destitute of proportion in its presentment, of 
justness in its application, and of all energy of will 
in the schemer to embody and vitalize it. 

But I see plainly, he says, that I cannot see. I 
know that human strength is not in extremes, but 
in avoiding extremes. I, at least, will shun the 


weakness of philosophizing beyond my depth. 


150 REPRESENTATIVE MEN 


What is the use of pretending to powers we have 
not? What is the use of pretending to assurances 
we have not, respecting the other life? Why ex- 
ageerate the power of virtue? Why be an angel 
before your time? These strings, wound up too 
high, will snap. If there is a wish for immortality, 
and no evidence, why not say just that? If there 
are conflicting evidences, why not state them? If 
there is not ground for a candid thinker to make 
up his mind, yea or nay, —why not suspend the 
judgment? I weary of these dogmatizers. I tire 
of these hacks of routine, who deny the dogmas. 
I neither affirm nor deny. I stand here to try the 
case. I am here to consider, cxoretv, to consider 
how it is. I will try to keep the balance true. Of 
what use to take the chair and glibly rattle off 
theories of society, religion and nature, when I 
know that practical objections lie in the way, in- 
surmountable by me and by my mates? Why so 
talkative in public, when each of my neighbors can 
pin me to my seat by arguments I cannot refute ? 
Why pretend that life is so simple a game, when 
we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is ? 
Why think to shut up all things in your narrow 
coop, when we know there are not one or two only, 
but ten, twenty, a thousand things, and unlike ? 
Why fancy that you have all the truth in your 
keeping? ‘There is much to say on all sides. 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 151 


Who shall forbid a wise skepticism, seeing that 
there is no practical question on which any thing 
more than an approximate solution can be had? Is 
not marriage an open question, when it is alleged, 
from the beginning of the world, that such as are 
in the institution wish to get out, and such as are 
out wish to get in? And the reply of Socrates, to 
him who asked whether he should choose a wife, 
still remains reasonable, that ‘“ whether he should 
choose one or not, he would repent it.” Is not 
the State a question? All society is divided in 
opinion on the subject of the State. Nobody loves 
it; great numbers dislike it and suffer conscien- 
tious scruples to allegiance ; and the only defence 
set up, is the fear of doing worse in disorganizing. 
Is it otherwise with the Church? Or, to put any 
of the questions which touch mankind nearest, — 
shall the young man aim at a leading part in law, 
in politics, in trade? It will not be pretended 
that a success in either of these kinds is quite 
coincident with what is best and inmost in his 
mind. Shall he then, cutting the stays that hold 
him fast to the social state, put out to sea with no 
guidance but his genius? There is much to say on 
both sides. Remember the open question between 
the present order of “competition” and the friends 
of “ attractive and associated labor.” The gener- 
ous minds embrace the proposition of labor shared 


152 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


by all; it is the only honesty; nothing else is safe. 
It is from the poor man’s hut alone that strength 
and virtue come: and yet, on the other side, it is 
alleged that labor impairs the form and breaks the 
spirit of man, and the laborers cry unanimously, 
‘We have no thoughts.’ Culture, how indispen- 
sable! I cannot forgive you the want of accom- 
plishments ; and yet culture will instantly impair 
that chiefest beauty of spontaneousness. Excellent 
is culture for a savage; but once let him read in’ 
the book, and he is no longer able not to think of 
Plutarch’s heroes. In short, since true fortitude 
of understanding consists ‘in not letting what we 
know be embarrassed by what we do not know,” 
we ought to secure those advantages which we can 
command, and not risk them by clutching after the 
airy and unattainable. Come, no chimeras! Let 
us go abroad; let us mix in affairs; let us learn 
and get and have and climb. “ Men are a sort of 
moving plants, and, like trees, receive a great part 
of their nourishment from the air. If they keep 
too much at home, they pine.’ Let us have a 
robust, manly life; let us know what we know, for 
certain ; what we have, let it be solid and season- 
able and our own. <A world in the hand-is worth 
two in the bush. Let us have to do with real men 
and women, and not with skipping ghosts. 

This then is the right ground of the skeptic, = 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 153 


this of consideration, of self-containing ; not at all 
of unbelief; not at all of universal.denying, nor 
of universal doubting, — doubting even that he 
doubts ; least of all of scoffing and profligate jeer- 
ing at all that is stable and good. These are no 
more his moods than are those of religion and _phi- 
losophy. He is the considerer, the prudent, taking 
in sail, counting stock, husbanding his means, be- 
leving that a man has too many enemies than that 
he can afford to be his own foe; that we cannot 
give ourselves too many advantages in this unequal 
conflict, with powers so vast and unweariable 
ranged on one side, and this little conceited vulner- 
able popinjay that a man is, bobbing up and. down 
into every danger, on the other. It is a position 
taken up for better defence, as of more safety, and 
one that can be maintained ; and it is one of more 
opportunity and range: as, when we build a house, 
the rule is to set it not too high nor too low, under 
the wind, but out of the dirt. 

The philosophy we want is one of fluxions and 
mobility. The Spartan.and Stoic schemes are too 
stark and stiff for our occasion. A theory of Saint 
John, and of nonresistance, seems, on the other 
hand, too thin and aerial. We want some coat 
woven of elastic steel, stout as the first and limber 
as the second. We want a ship in these billows 
we inhabit. An angular, dogmatic house would 


154 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


be rent to chips and splinters in this storm of many 
elements. No, it must be tight, and fit to the form 
of man, to live at all; asa shell must dictate the 
architecture of a house founded on the sea. The 
soul of man must be the type of our scheme, just 
as the body of man is the type after which a 
dwelling-house is built. Adaptiveness is the pecu- 
harity of human_nature. We are golden averages, 
volitant stabilities, compensated or periodic errors, 
houses founded on the sea. The wise skeptic 
wishes to have a near view of the best game and 
the chief players; what is best in the planet ; art 
and nature, places and events; but mainly men. 
Every thing that is excellent in mankind, — a form 
of grace, an arm of iron, lips of persuasion, a brain 
of resources, every one skilful to play and win, — 
he will see and judge. 

The terms of admission to this spectacle are, 
that he have a certain solid and intelligible way of 
living of his own; some method of answering the 
inevitable needs of human life; proof that he has 
played with skill and success ; that he has evinced 
the temper, stoutness and the range of qualities 
which, among his contemporaries and countrymen, 
entitle him to fellowship and trust. For the secrets 
of life are not shown except to sympathy and. like- 
ness. Men do not confide themselves to boys, or 
coxcombs, or pedants, but to their peers. Some 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 155 


wise limitation, as the modern phrase is; some 
condition between the extremes, and having, itself, a 
positive quality; some stark and sufficient man, who 
is not salt or sugar, but sufficiently related to the 
world to do justice to Paris or London, and, at the 
same time, a vigorous and original thinker, whom 
cities can not overawe, but who uses them, — is the 
fit person to occupy this ground of speculation. 
These qualities meet in the character of Mon- 
taigne. And yet, since the personal regard which 
I entertain for Montaigne may be unduly great, I 
will, under the shield of this prince of egotists, 
offer, as an apology for electing him as the repre-| 
sentative of skepticism, a word or two to explain 
how my love began and grew for this admirable, 
gossip. | 
A single odd volume of Cotton’s translation of 
the Essays remained to me from my father’s li- 
brary, when a boy. It lay long neglected, until, 
after many years, when I was newly escaped from 
college, I read the book, and procured the remain- 
ing volumes. I remember the delight and wonder 
in which I lived with it. It seemed to me as if I 
had myself written the book, in some former life, 
so sincerely it spoke to my thought and experience. 
It happened, when in Paris, in 1833, that, in the 
cemetery of Pére Lachaise, [ came to a tomb of 


Auguste Collignon, who died in 1830, aged sixty- 


156 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


eight years, and who, said the monument, “ lived 
\to do right, and had formed himself to virtue on 
jthe Essays of Montaigne.” Some years later, I 
became acquainted with an accomplished English 
poet, John Sterling; and, in prosecuting my cor- 
respondence, I found that, from a love of Mon- 
taigne, he had made a pilgrimage to his chateau, 
still standing near Castellan, in Perigord, and, af- 
ter two hundred and fifty years, had copied from 
the walls of his library the inscriptions which Mon- 
taigne had written there. That Journal of Mr. 
Sterling’s, published in the Westminster Review, 
Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted in the Prolegomenu to 
his edition of the Essays. I heard with pleasure 
that one of the newly-discovered autographs of 
William Shakspeare was in a copy of Florio’s trans- 
lation of Montaigne. It is the only book which we 
certainly know to have been in the poet’s library. 
And, oddly enough, the duplicate copy of Florio, 
which the British Museum purchased with a view 
of protecting the Shakspeare autograph, (as I was 
informed in the Museum,) turned out to have the 
autograph of Ben Jonson in the fly-leaf. Leigh 
Hunt relates of Lord Byron, that Montaigne was 
the only great writer of past times whom he read 
with avowed satisfaction. Other coincidences, not 
needful to be mentioned here, concurred to make 
this old Gascon still new and immortal for me. 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 157 
In 1571, on the death of his father, Montaigne, 


then thirty-eight years old, retired from the prac- 
tice of law at Bordeaux, and settled himself on his 
estate. Though he had been a man of pleasure 
and sometimes a courtier, his studious habits now 
grew on him, and he loved the compass, staidness 
and independence of the country gentleman’s life. 
He took up his economy in good earnest, and made 
his farms yield the most. Downright and plain- 
dealing, and abhorring to be deceived or to de- 
ceive, he was esteemed in the country for his sense 
and probity. In the civil wars of the League, 
which converted every house into a fort, Montaigne 
kept his gates open and his house without defence. 
All parties freely came and went, his courage and 
honor being universally esteemed. The neighbor- 
ing lords and gentry brought jewels and papers to 
him for safe-keeping. Gibbon reckons, in these 
bigoted times, but two men of liberality in France, 
— Henry IV. and Montaigne. 
Montaigne_is the frankest_and. honestest Lot all 
writers. His French freedom runs into STOSSNESS $ 
but he has anticipated all censure by the bounty of 
his own confessions. In his times, books were 
written to one sex only, and almost all were writ- 
ten in Latin; so that in a humorist a certain na- 
kedness of statement was permitted, which our 
manners, of a literature addressed equally to both 


158 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


sexes, do not allow. But though a biblical plain- 
ness coupled with a most uncanonical levity may 
shut his pages to many sensitive readers, yet the 
offence is superficial. He parades it: he makes 
the most of it: nobody can think or say worse of 
him than he does. He pretends to most of the 
vices; and, if there be any virtue in him, he says, 
it got in by stealth. There is no man, in his opin- 
ion, who has not deserved hanging five or six times ; 
and he pretends no exception in his own behalf. 


2? 


‘Hive or six as ridiculous stories,” too, he says, 
‘can be told of me, as of any man living.” But, 
with all this really superfluous frankness, the opin- 
ion of an invincible probity grows into every read- 
er’s mind. ‘When I the most strictly and relig- 
iously confess myself, I find that the best virtue I 
have has in it some tincture of vice; and I, who 
am as sincere and perfect a lover of virtue of that 
stamp as any other whatever, am afraid that Plato, 
in his purest virtue, if he had listened and laid his 
ear close to himself, would have heard some jarring 
sound of human mixture; but faint and remote 
and only to be perceived by himself.” 

Here is an impatience and fastidiousness at color 
or pretence of any kind. He has been in courts so 
long as to have conceived a furious disgust at ap- 
pearances; he will indulge himself with a little 
cursing and swearing; he will talk with sailors and 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 159 


gipsies, use flash and street ballads; he has stayed. 
in-doors till he is deadly sick; he will to the open 
air, though it rain bullets. He has seen too much 
of gentlemen of the long robe, until he wishes for 
cannibals ; and is so nervous, by factitious life, that 
he thinks the more barbarous man is, the better he 
is. He likes his saddle. You may read theology, 
and grammar, and metaphysics elsewhere. What- 
ever you get here shall smack of the earth and of 
real life, sweet, or smart, or stinging. He makes 
no hesitation to entertain you with the records of 
his disease, and his journey to Italy is quite full of 
that matter. He took and kept this position of 
equilibrium. Over his name he drew an emblem-) 
atic pair of scales, and wrote Que s¢ais je? under \ 
it. As I look at his effigy opposite the title-page, ( 
I seem to hear him say, ‘ You may play old Poz, if 
you will; you may rail and exaggerate, — I stand 
here for truth, and will not, for all the states and 
churches and revenues and personal reputations 
of Europe, overstate the dry fact, as I see it; I 
will rather mumble and prose about what I cer- 
tainly know, —my house and barns; my father, 
my wife and my tenants; my old lean bald pate ; 
my knives and forks; what meats I eat and what 
drinks I prefer, and a hundred straws just as ridic- 
ulous,— than I will write, with a fine crow-quill, 
a fine romance. I like gray days, and autumn and 


160 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


winter weather. I am gray and autumnal myself, 
and think an undress and old shoes that do not 
pinch my feet, and old friends who do not con- 
strain me, and plain topics where I do not need to 
strain myself and pump my brains, the most suit- 
able. Our condition as men is risky and ticklish 
enough. One cannot be sure of himself and _ his 
fortune an hour, but he may be whisked off into 
some pitiable or ridiculous plight. Why should I 
vapor and play the philosopher, instead of ballast- 
ing, the best I can, this dancing balloon? So, at 
least, I live within compass, keep myself ready for 
action, and can shoot the gulf at last with decency. 
If there be any thing farcical in such a life, the 
blame is not mine: let it lie at fate’s and nature’s 
door.’ 

The Essays, therefore, are an entertaining solilo- 
\quy on every random topic that comes into his 
head; treating every thing without ceremony, yet 
with masculine sense. ‘There have been men with 
deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man 
with such abundance of thoughts: he is never dull, 
never insincere, and has the genius to make the 
_reader care for all that he cares for. 

The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to 
his sentences. 1 know not anywhere the book that 
seems less written. It is the language of conversa- 
tion transferred to a book. Cut these words, and. 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 161 


they would bleed ; they are vascular and alive. One 
has the same pleasure in it that he feels in listening 
to the necessary speech of men about their work, 
when any unusual circumstance gives momentary 
importance to the dialogue. For blacksmiths and 
teamsters do not trip in their speech ; it is a shower 
of bullets. It is Cambridge men who correct them- 
selves and begin again .at every half sentence, and, 
moreover, will pun, and refine too much, and 
swerve from the matter to the expression. Mon- 
taigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and 
books and himself, and uses the positive degree; 
never shrieks, or protests, or prays: no weakness, no 
convulsion, no superlative: does not wish to jump 
out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate 
space or time, but is stout and solid; tastes every 
moment of the day; likes pain because it makes 
him feel himself and realize things; as we pinch 
ourselves to know that we are awake. He keeps 
the plain; he rarely mounts or sinks; likes to feel 
solid ground and the stones underneath. His writ- 
ing has no enthusiasms, no aspiration ; contented, 
self-respecting and keeping the middle of the road. 
There is but one exception, — in his love for Soc-) 
rates. In speaking of him, for once his cheek ; 
flushes and his style rises to passion. 

Montaigne died of a quinsy, at the age of sixty,| 


in 1592. When he came to die he caused the mass 
VOL. IV. 11 


162 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


to be celebrated in his chamber. At the age of 
thirty-three, he had been married. ‘ But,” he says, 
‘might I have had my own will, I would not have 
married Wisdom herself, if she would have had 
me: but ’tis to much purpose to evade it, the 
common. custom and use of life will have it so. 
Most of my actions are guided by example, not 
choice.” In the hour of death, he gave the same 
weight to custom. Que scais je? What do I 
know ? . 

This book of Montaigne the world has endorsed 
by translating it into all tongues and printing sev- 
enty-five editions of it in Europe; and that, too, a 
circulation somewhat chosen, namely among court- 
iers, soldiers, princes, men of the world and men of 
wit and generosity. 


Shall we say that Montaigne has spoken wisely, 
and given the right and permanent expression of 
the human mind, on the conduct of life ? 

We are natural believers. Truth,or the connec- 


(tion between cause and effect, alone interests us. 


We are persuaded that a thread runs through all 


things: all worlds are strung on it, as beads; and 
men, and events, and life, come to us only because 


of that thread: they pass and repass only that we 
-may know the direction and continuity of that line. 


A book or statement which goes to show that there 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 163 


is no line, but random and chaos, a calamity out of 
nothing, a prosperity and no account of it, a hero 
born from a fool, a fool from a hero, — dispirits us. 
Seen or unseen, we believe the. tie exists. Talent 
makes counterfeit ties; genius finds the real ones. 
We hearken to the man of science, because we an- 
ticipate the sequence in natural phenomena which 
he uncovers. We love whatever affirms, connects, 
preserves ; and dislike what scatters or pulls down. 
One man appears whose nature is to all men’s eyes 
conserving and constructive : his presence supposes 
a well-ordered society, agriculture, trade, large in- 
stitutions and empire. If these did not exist, they 
would begin to exist through his endeavors. There- 
fore he cheers and comforts men, who feel all this 
in him very readily. The nonconformist and the 
rebel say all manner of unanswerable things against 
the existing republic, but discover to our sense no 
plan of house or state of their own. Therefore, 
though the town and state and way of living, which 
our counsellor contemplated, might be a very mod- 
est or musty prosperity, yet men rightly go for 
him, and reject the reformer so long as he comes 
only with axe and crowbar. 

But though we are natural conservers and. caus- 
ationists, and reject a sour, dumpish unbelief, the 
skeptical class, which Montaigne represents, have 
reason, and every man, at some time, belongs to it. 


164 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Every superior mind will pass through this domain 
of equilibration, —I should rather say, will know 
how to avail himself of the checks and balances in 
nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggera- 
tion and formalism of bigots and blockheads. 

Skepticism is the attitude assumed by the stu- 
dent in relation to the particulars which society 
adores, but which he sees to be reverend only in 
their tendency and spirit. The ground occupied 
by the skeptic is the vestibule of the temple. Soci- 
ety does not like to have any breath of question 
blown on the existing order. But the interroga- 
tion of custom at all points is an inevitable stage 
in the growth of every superior mind, and is the 
evidence of its perception of the flowing power 
which remains itself in all changes. 

The superior mind will find itself equally at 
odds with the evils of society and with the projects 
that are offered to relieve them. ‘The wise skeptic 
is a bad citizen ; no conservative, he sees the sel- 
fishness of property and the drowsiness of institu- 
tions. But neither is he fit to work with any demo- 
cratic party that ever was constituted ; for parties 
wish every one committed, and he penetrates the 
popular patriotism. His politics are those of the 
“Soul’s Errand” of Sir Walter Raleigh; or of 
Krishna, in the Bhagavat, ‘‘ There is none who is 
worthy of my love or hatred ;”’ whilst he sentences 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 165 


law, physic, divinity, commerce and custom. He 
is areformer; yet he is no better member of the 
philanthropic association. It turns out that he is 
not the champion of the operative, the pauper, the 
prisoner, the slave. It stands in his mind that our 
life in this world is not of quite so easy interpreta- 
tion as churches and school-books say. He does 
not wish to take ground against these benevolences, 
to play the part of devil’s attorney, and blazon 
every doubt and sneer that darkens the sun for 
him. But he says, There are doubts. 

I mean to use the occasion, and celebrate the 
calendar-day of our Saint Michel de Montaigne, by 
counting and describing these doubts or negations. 
I wish to ferret them out of their hoies and sun 
them a little. We must do with them as the police 
do with old rogues, who are shown up to the pub- 
he at the marshal’s office. They will never be so 
formidable when once they have been identified 
and registered. But I mean honestly by them, — 
that justice shall be done to their terrors. I shall 
not take Sunday objections, made up on purpose to 
be put down. I shall take the worst I can find, 
whether I can dispose of them or they of me. 

I do not press the skepticism of the materialist. 
I know the quadruped opinion will not prevail. 
"Tis of no importance what bats and oxen think. 
The first dangerous symptom I report is, the levity 


166 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


of intellect; as if it were fatal to earnestness to 
know much. Knowledge is the knowing that we 
can not know. The dull pray; the geniuses are 
light mockers. How respectable is earnestness on 
every platform! but intellect kills it. Nay, San 
Carlo, my subtle and admirable friend, one of the 
most penetrating of men, finds that all direct as- 
cension, even of lofty piety, leads to this ghastly 
insight and sends back the votary orphaned. My 
astonishing San Carlo thought the lawgivers and 
saints infected. They found the ark empty; saw, 
and would not tell; and tried to choke off their ap- 
proaching followers, by saying, ‘ Action, action, my 
dear fellows, is for you!’ Bad as was to me this 
detection by San Carlo, this frost in July, this 
blow from a bride, there was still a worse, namely 
the cloy or satiety of the saints. In the mount of 
vision, ere they have yet risen from their knees, 
they say, ‘We discover that this our homage and 
beatitude is partial and deformed: we must fly 
for relief to the suspected and reviled Intellect, to 
the Understanding, the Mephistopheles, to the 
gymnastics of talent.’ 

This is hobgoblin the first; and, though it has 
been the subject of much elegy in our nineteenth 
century, from Byron, Goethe and other poets of 
less fame, not to mention many distinguished pri- 
vate observers, — I confess it is not very affecting 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 167 


to my imagination; for it seems to concern the 
shattering of baby -houses and crockery - shops. 
What flutters the Church of Rome, or of England, 
or of Geneva, or of Boston, may yet be very far 
from touching any principle of faith. I think that 
the intellect and moral sentiment are unanimous : 
and that though philosophy extirpates bugbears, yet 
it supplies the natural checks of vice, and polarity to 
the soul. I think that the wiser a man is, the more 
stupendous he finds the natural and moral econ- 
omy, and lifts himself to a more absolute reliance. 
There is the power of moods, each setting at 
nought all but its own tissue of facts and beliefs. 
There is the power of complexions, obviously modi- 
fying the dispositions and sentiments. The beliefs 
and unbeliefs appear to be structural ; and as soon 
as each man attains the poise and vivacity which 
allow the whole machinery to play, he will not 
need extreme examples, but will rapidly alternate 
all opinions in his own life. Our life is March 
weather, savage and serene in one hour. We go 
forth austere, dedicated, believing in the iron links 
of Destiny, and will not turn on our heel to save 
our life: but a book, or a bust, or only the sound 
of a name, shoots a spark through the nerves, and 
we suddenly believe in will: my finger-ring shall 
be the seal of Solomon; fate is for imbeciles; all 
is possible to the resolved mind. Presently a new 


168 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


experience gives a new turn to our thoughts: com- 
mon sense resumes its tyranny ; we say, ‘ Well, the 
army, after all, is the gate to fame, manners and 
poetry: and, look you, —on the whole, selfishness 
plants best, prunes best, makes the best commerce 
and the best citizen.’ Are the opinions of a man 
on right and wrong, on fate and causation, at the 
mercy of a broken sleep or an indigestion? Is his 
/ belief in God and Duty no deeper than a stomach 
evidence ? And what guaranty for the permanence 
of his opinions? I like not the French celerity, — 
a new Church and State once a week. This is 
the second negation; and I shall let it pass for 
what it will. As far as it asserts rotation of states 
of mind, I suppose it suggests its own remedy, 
namely in the record of larger periods. What is 
the mean of many states; of all the states? Does 
the general voice of ages affirm any principle, or is 
no community of sentiment discoverable in distant 
times and places? And when it shows the power 
of self-interest, I accept that as part of the divine 
law and must reconcile it with aspiration the best 
I can. 

The word Fate, or Destiny, expresses the sense 
of mankind, in all ages, that the laws of the world 
do not always befriend, but often hurt and crush 
us. Fate, in the shape of Hinde or nature, grows 
over us like grass. We paint Time with a scythe; 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 169 


Love and Fortune, blind; and Destiny, deaf. We » 
have too little power of resistance against this fe- 
rocity which champs us up. What front can we 
make against these unavoidable, victorious, malefi- 
cent forces? What can I do against the influence 
of Race, in my history? What can I do against 
hereditary and constitutional habits ; against scrof- 
ula, lymph, impotence? against climate, against, 
barbarism, in my country? (I can reason down or) 
deny eyery thing, except this perpetual Belly : feed 
he must and will, and I cannot make him respect-\ 


able. 


But the main resistance which the affirmative 
impulse finds, and one including all others, is in 
the doctrine of the Llusionists. There is a pain- 
ful rumor_in circulation that we have been prac- 
tised upon in all the principal performances of life, 
and free agency is the emptiest name. We have 
been sopped and drugged with the air, with food, 
with woman, with children, with sciences, with 
events, which leave us exactly where they found 
us. The mathematics, ’tis complained, leave the 
mind where they find it: so do all sciences; and so 
do all events and actions. I find a man who has 
passed through all the sciences, the churl he was ;) 
and, through all the offices, learned, civil and so- 
cial, can detect the child. We are not the less 


< 


170 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


necessitated to dedicate life to them. In fact we 
may come to accept it as the fixed rule and theory 
of our state of education, that God is a substance, 
and his method is illusion. The eastern sages 
owned the goddess Yoganidra, the great illusory 
energy of Vishnu, by whom, as utter ignorance, the 
whole world is beguiled. 

Or shall I state it thus? — The astonishment 
of life is the absence of any appearance of recon- 
ciliation between the theory and practice ,of life. 
Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, 
now and then, for a serene and profound moment 
amidst the hubbub-of cares and works which have 
no direct bearing on it ; — is then lost for months 
or years, and again found for an interval, to be 
lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in 
fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours. 
But what are these cares and works the better? 
A method in the world we do not see, but this par- 
allelism of great and little, which never react on 
each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to 
converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, read- 
ings, writings, are nothing to the purpose; as 
when a man comes into the room it does not ap- 


., pear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo, 
_—he has contrived to get so much bone and fibre 


as he wants, out of rice or out of snow. So vast is 
the disproportion between the sky of law and the 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 171 


pismire of performance under it, that whether he 
is a man of worth or a sot is not so great a matter 
as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this en- 
chantment, the stunning non-intercourse law which 
makes co-operation impossible? The young spirit 
pants to enter society. But all the ways of culture 
and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He 
has been often baulked. He did not expect a sym- 
pathy with his thought from the village, but he 
went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and 
found no entertainment for it, but mere misappre- 
hension, distaste and scoffing. Men are strangely 
mistimed and misapplied; and the excellence of 
each is an inflamed individualism which separates 
him more. 

There are these, and more than these diseases of 
thought, which our ordinary teachers do not at- 
tempt to remove. Now shall we, because a good 
nature inclines us to virtue’s side, say, There are 
no doubts, — and lie for the right? Is life to be 
led in a brave or in a cowardly manner? and is 
not the satisfaction of the doubts essential to all 
manliness? Is the name of virtue to be a barrier 
to that which is virtue? Can you not believe that 
aman of earnest and burly habit may find small 
good in tea, essays and catechism, and want a 
rougher instruction, want men, labor, trade, farm- 
ing, war, hunger, plenty, love, hatred, doubt and 


(erry 


i big REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


terror to make things plain to him; and has he 
not a right to insist on being convinced in his own 
way? When he is convinced, he will be worth the 
pains. 

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of 
the soul; unbelief, in denying them. Some minds 
are incapable of skepticism. The doubts they pro- 
fess to entertain are rather a civility or accommo- 
dation to the common discourse of their company. 
They may well give themselves leave to speculate, 
for they are secure of a return. Once admitted to 
the heaven of thought, they see no relapse into 
night, but infinite invitation on the other side. 
Heaven is within heaven, and sky over sky, and 


\they are encompassed with divinities. Others there 


are to whom the heaven is brass, and it shuts down 
to the surface of the earth. It is a question of 
temperament, or of more or less immersion in 
nature. The last class must needs have a reflex or 
parasite faith ; not a sight of realities, but an in- 
stinctive reliance on the seers and believers of 
realities. The manners and thoughts of believers 
astonish them and convince them that these have 
seen something which is hid from themselves. But 
their sensual habit would fix the believer to his last 
position, whilst he as inevitably advances; and pres- 
ently the unbeliever, for love of belief, burns the 


believer. 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 173 


Great believers are always reckoned infidels, im- 
practicable, fantastic, atheistic, and really men of 
no account. The spiritualist finds himself driven 
to express his faith by a series of skepticisms. 
Charitable souls come with their projects and ask 
his co-operation. How can he hesitate? It is the 
rule of mere comity and courtesy to agree where 
you can, and to turn your sentence with something 
auspicious, and not freezing and sinister. But he 
is forced to say, ‘O, these things will be as they 
must be: what can you do? These particular 
eriefs and crimes are the foliage and fruit of such 
trees as we see growing. It is vain to complain of 
the leaf or the berry; cut it off, it will bear another 
just as bad. You must begin your cure lower 
down.’ The generosities of the day prove an 
intractable element for him. The people’s ques- 
tions are not his; their methods are not his; and 
against all the dictates of good nature he is driven 
to say he has no pleasure in them. 

Even the doctrines dear to the hope of man, of 
the divine Providence and of the immortality of the 
soul, his neighbors’ can not put the statement so 
that he shall affirm it. But he denies out of more 
faith, and not less. He denies out of honesty. He 
had rather stand charged with the imbecility of 
skepticism, than with untruth. I believe, he says, 
in the moral design of the universe; it exists hos- 


174 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


pitably for the weal of souls; but your dogmas 
seem to me caricatures : why should I make believe 
them? Will any say, This is cold and infidel ? 
The wise and magnanimous will not say so. They 
will exult in his far-sighted good-will that can 
abandon to the adversary all the ground of tradi- 
tion and common belief, without losing a jot of 
strength. It sees to the end of all transgression. 
George Fox saw that there was “an ocean of dark- 
ness and death; but withal an infinite ocean of 
light and love which flowed over that of dark- 
ness,” 

The final solution in which skepticism is lost, is 
in the moral sentiment, which never forfeits its 
supremacy. All moods may be safely tried, and 
their weight allowed to all objections: the moral 
sentiment as easily outweighs them all, as any one. 
This is the drop which balances the sea. I play 
with the miscellany of facts, and take those super- 
ficial views which we call skepticism; but I know 
that they will presently appear to me in that order 
which makes skepticism impossible. A man of 
thought must feel the thought that is parent of 
the universe; that the masses of nature do undu- 
late and flow. 

This faith avails to the whole emergency of life 
and objects. The world is saturated with deity 
and with law. He is content with just and unjust, 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 175 


with sots and fools, with the triumph of folly and 
fraud. He can behold with serenity the yawning 
gulf between the ambition of man and his power 
of performance, between the demand and supply of 
power, which makes the tragedy of all souls. 
Charles Fourier announced that “ the attractions 
of man are proportioned to his destinies ;” in other 
words, that every-desiré predicts. itsown-satisfac- 
tion... Yet all experience exhibits the reverse of 
this; the incompetency of power is the universal 
grief of young and ardent minds. They accuse 
the divine providence of a certain parsimony. It 
has shown the heaven and earth to every child 
and filled him with a desire for the whole; a desire 
raging, infinite; a hunger, as of space to be filled 
with planets; a cry of famine, as of devils for 
souls. Then for the satisfaction, — to each man is 
administered a single drop, a bead of dew of vital 
power, per day, — a cup as large as space, and one 
drop of the water of life in it. Each man woke in 
the morning with an appetite that could eat the 
solar system like a cake; a spirit for action and 
passion without bounds ; he could lay his hand on 
the morning star; he could try conclusions with 
gravitation or chemistry ; but, on the first motion 
to prove his strength, — hands, feet, senses, gave 
way and would not serve him. He was an emperor 
deserted by his states, and left to whistle by him 


176 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


self, or thrust into a mob of emperors, all whist- 
ling: and still the sirens sang, “‘ The attractions are 
proportioned tothe destinies.” In every house, 
in the heart of each maiden and of each boy, in the 
soul of the soaring saint, this chasm is found, — 
between the largest promise of ideal power, and 
the shabby experience. 

The expansive nature of truth comes to our suc- 
cor, elastic, not to be surrounded. Man helps him- 
self by larger generalizations. ‘The lesson of life 

Vis practically to generalize; to believe what the 
/years and the centuries say, against the hours ; to 
\resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate 
to their catholic sense. Things seem to say one 
thing, and say the reverse. ‘The appearance is im- 
moral; the result is moral. Things seem to tend 
downward, to justify despondency, to promote 
rogues, to defeat the just; and by knaves as by 
martyrs the just cause is carried forward. Al- 
though knaves win in every political struggle, al- 
though society seems to be delivered over from the 
hands of one set of criminals into the hands of an- 
other set of criminals, as fast as the government 
is changed, and the march of civilization is a train 
of felonies, — yet, general ends are somehow an- 
swered. We see, now, events forced on which 
seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. 
_ But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms 


MONTAIGNE; OR, THE SKEPTIC. 177 


and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger 
at laws: and so, throughout history, heaven seems | 
to affect low and poer means. Through the years \| 
and the centuries, through evil agents, through {| oy 
toys and atoms, a great and. beneficent tendency | iY 
irresistibly streams. 

Let a man learn to look for the permanent in| 
the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the 
disappearance of things he was wont to reverence’ 
without losing his reverence ; let him learn that he | 
is here, not to work but to be worked upon ; and 
that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion | 
displace opinion, all are at last contained in the — 
Eternal Cause :— 

“Tf my bark sink, ’t is to another sea.” 
VOL. IV. 12 


r ae indie A 
hie ule 


eee ait Bicar ve 
ce & Tacs Pascua 1s a ‘hid ae. 


0 
Ca Pe 


2 


ase 


Haars. fith 


ie Sit a? itis ke 3 us pe oh a 


we FOILSE a ti Ce s glide i a in ti ai LaYein ale 


Lae Beira 9% 
rik a if sire te 





$2 CBhy {YG a Fi anit ee, * eh rer Bi. 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 





Ne 
SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 





GREAT men are more distinguished by range 
and extent than by originality. If we require the 
originality which consists in weaving, like a spi- | 
der, their web from their own bowels; in finding 
clay and making bricks and building the house; no — 
great men are original. Nor does valuable origi- 
nality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero 
is in the press of knights and the thick of events ; 
and seeing what men want and sharing their de- 
sire, he adds the needful length of sight and of 
arm, to come at the desired point. The greatest 
genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no 
rattle-brain, saying what comes uppermost, and, be- i 
cause he says every thing, saying at last something / 
good; but a heart in unison with his time and | 
country. There is nothing whimsical and fantas- 
tic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, 
freighted with the weightiest convictions and point- 
ed with the most determined aim which any man 
or class knows of in his times. 


182 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, 
and will not have any individual great, except 
through the general. There is no choice to gen- 
ius. A great man does not wake up on some fine 
morning and say, ‘Iam full of life, I will go to 
sea and find an Antarctic continent: to-day IY will 
square the circle: I will ransack botany and find 
a new food for man: I have a new architecture in 
my mind: I foresee a new mechanic power:’ no, 
but he finds himself-in-the river of the thoughts 
and events, forced onward by the ideas and neces- 
sities of his contemporaries.. He stands where all 
the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all 
point in the direction in which he should go. The 
Church has reared him amidst rites and pomps, 
and he carries out the advice which her music gave 
him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants 
and processions. He finds a war raging: it edu- 
cates him, by trumpet, in barracks, and he betters 
the instruction. He finds two counties groping to 
bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of pro- 
duction to the place of consumption, and he hits on 
a railroad. Every master has found his materials 
collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with 
his people and in his love of the materials he 
wrought in. What an economy of power! and 
what a compensation for the shortness of life! 


Allis done to his hand, The world has brought 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 183 


him thus far on his way. The human race has 
gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hol- 
lows and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, 
artisans, women, all haye worked for him, and he 
enters into their labors. Choose any other thing, 
out of the line of tendency, out of the national feel- 
ing and history, and he would have all to do for 
himself: his powers would be expended in the first 
preparations. Great genial power, one would al- 
most say, consists in not being original at all; in 
being altogether receptive ; in letting the world do 
all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass un- 
obstructed through the mind. 

Shakspeare’s youth fell in a time when the Eng- 
lish people were importunate for dramatic enter- 
tainments. The court took offence easily at politi- 
cal allusions and attempted to suppress them. 
The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and 
the religious among the Anglican church, would 
suppress them. But the people wanted them. 
Inn-yards, houses without roofs, and extempora- 
neous enclosures at country fairs were the ready 
theatres of strolling players. The people had) 
tasted this new joy ; and, as we could not hope to, 
suppress newspapers now, — no, not by the strong-’ 
est party, — neither then could king, prelate, or, 
puritan, alone or united, suppress an organ which 
was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, Punch 


184 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


and library, at the same time. Probably king, 
prelate and puritan, all found their own account in 
it. It had become, by all causes, a national inter- 
est, — by no means conspicuous, so that some great 
scholar would have thought of treating it in an 
English history, — but not a whit less considerable 
because it was cheap and of no account, like a 
baker’s-shop. The best proof of its vitality is the 
crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this 
field; Kyd, Marlow, Greene, Jonson, Chapman, 
Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele, 
Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher. 

The secure possession, by the stage, of the pub- 
lic mind, is of the first importance to the poet who 
works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. 
Here is audience and expectation prepared. In 
the case of Shakspeare there is much more. At 
the time when he left Stratford and went up to 
London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates 
and writers existed in manuscript and were in 
turn produced on the boards. Here is the Tale of 
Troy, which the audience will bear hearing some 
part of, every week; the Death of Julius Cesar, 
and other stories out of Plutarch, which they never 
tire of; a shelf full of English history, from the 
chronicles of Brut and Arthur, down to the royal 
Henries, which men hear eagerly ; and a string of 
-floleful tragedies, merry Italian tales and Spanish 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 185 


voyages, which all the London ’prentices know. 
All the mass has been treated, with more or less 
skill, by every playwright, and the prompter has the 
soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no 
longer possible to say who wrote them first. They 
have been the property of the Theatre so long, and 
so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered 
them, inserting a speech or a whole scene, or add- 
ing a song, that no man can any longer claim copy- 
right in this work of numbers. Happily, no man 
wishes to. ‘They are not yet desired in that way. 
We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. 
They had best lie where they are. 

Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, es- 
teemed the mass of old plays waste stock, in which 
any experiment could be freely tried. Had the 
prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy ex- 
isted, nothing could have been done. The rude 
warm blood of the living England circulated in the 
play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which 
he wanted to his airy and majestic fancy. The 
poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which 
he may work, and which, again, may restrain his 
art within the due temperance. It holds him to 
the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, 
and in furnishing so much work done to his hand, 
leaves him at leisure and in full strength for the 
audacities of his imagination In short, the poet 


186 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the tem- 
ple. Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up 
in subordination to architecture. It was the orna- 
ment of the temple wall: at first a rude relief 
carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder 
and a head or arm was projected from the wall ; 
the groups being still arranged with reference to 
the building, which serves also as a frame to hold 
the figures; and when at last the greatest freedom 
of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing 
genius of architecture still enforced a certain calm- 
ness and continence in the statue. As soon as the 
statue was begun for itself, and with no reference 
to the temple or palace, the art began to decline : 
freak, extravagance and exhibition took the place 
of the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which 
the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irri- 
tability of poetic talent found in the accumulated 
dramatic materials to which the people were al- 
ready wonted, and which had a certain excellence 
which no single genius, however extraordinary, 
could hope to create. 

In point of fact it appears that Shakspeare did 
owe debts in all directions, and was able to use 
whatever he found; and the amount of indebted- 
ness may be inferred from Malone’s laborious com- 
putations in regard to the First, Second and Third 
parts of Henry VI., in which, “ out of 6,048 lines, 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 187 


1,771 were written by some author preceding Shak- 
speare, 2,373 by him, on the foundation laid by his 
predecessors, and 1,899 were entirely his own.” 
And the proceeding investigation hardly leaves a 
single drama of his absolute invention. Malone’s 
sentence is an important piece of external history. 
In Henry_VIII. I think I see plainly the cropping 
out of the original rock on which his own finer 
stratum was laid. The first play was written by a 
superior, thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can 
mark his lines, and know well their cadence. See 
Wolsey’s soliloquy, and the following scene with 
Cromwell, where instead of the metre of Shakspeare, 
whose secret is that the thought constructs the tune, 
so that reading for the sense will best bring out 
the rhythm, — here the lines are constructed on a 
given tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit 
eloquence. But the play contains through all its 
length unmistakable traits of Shakspeare’s hand, 
and some passages, as the account of the coronation, 
are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment 
to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm. 
Shakspeare knew that tradition supphes a better 
fable than any inventioncan. If he lost any credit 
of design, he augmented his resources; and, at 
that day, our petulant demand for originality was 
not so much pressed. There was no literature for 
the million. The universal reading, the cheap 


188 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


press, were unknown. A great poet who appears 
in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the 
light which is any where radiating. Every intel- 
lectual jewel, every flower of sentiment it is his fine 
office to bring to his people ; and he comes to value 
’ ‘his _memory equally with his invention, He is 
"therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have 

been derived; whether through translation, whether 

through tradition, whether by travel in distant coun- 

tries, whether by inspiration ; from whatever source, 

they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. 

Nay, he borrows very near home. Other men say 
\Swise things as well as he; only they say a good 
‘many foolish things, and do not know when they 
have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the 
true stone, andputs-it-in high place, wherever he 
finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer per- 
haps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt that all wit 
was their wit. ‘And they are librarians and his- 
toriographers, as well as poets. | Each romancer was 
heir and dispenser of all the ‘hundred tales of the 
world, — 

* Presenting Thebes’ and Pelops’ line 
And the tale of Troy divine.” 

The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our 
early literature; and more recently not only Pope 
and Dryden have been beholden to him, but, in the 
whole society of English writers, a large unacknowl. 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 189 


edged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with 
the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But 
Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, 
drew continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, 
from Guido di Colonna, whose Latin romance of 
the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from 
Dares Phrygius, Ovid and Statius. Then Petrarch, 
Boccaccio and the Provencal poets are his benefac- 
tors: the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious 
translation from William of Lorris and John of 
Meung: Troilus and Creseide, from Lollius of Ur- 
bino: The Cock and the Fox, from the Lais of 
Marie: The House of Fame, from the French or 
Italian : and poor Gower he uses as if he were only 
a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to build 
his house. He steals by this apology, — that. what 
he takes has no worth where he finds it and the 
greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be ) 
practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man 
having once shown himself capable of original writ- \ 
ing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writ- > 
ings of others at discretion. Thought is the proper: > 
ty of him who can entertain it and of him who can ’ 
adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks>\ 
the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as we S 
have learned what to do with them they become our ° 
own. 

Thus all originality 1s relative. Every thinker is 


190 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


retrospective. The learned member of the legisla. 
ture, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks and 
votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and 
the now invisible channels by which the senator is 
made aware of their wishes; the crowd of practical . 
and knowing men, who, by correspondence or con- 
versation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes 
and estimates, and it will bereave his fine attitude 
and resistance of something of their impressiveness. 
As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so 
Locke and Rousseau think, for thousands; and so 
there were fountains all around Homer, Menu, 
\ Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends, 
} lovers, books, traditions, proverbs, —all perished 
»— which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. 
Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel 
himself overmatched by any companion? The ap- 
peal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there 
at last in his breast a Delphi whereof to ask con- 
cerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily 
so, yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on 
that? All the debts which such a man could con- 
tract to other wit would never disturb his conscious- 
ness of originality; for the ministrations of books 
and of other minds are a whiff of smoke to that 
most private reality with which he has conversed. 
It is easy to see that what is best written or 
done by genius in the world, was no man’s work, 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 191 


but came by wide social labor, when a thousand - 
wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. .Our| ° 
English. Bible is a wonderful specimen of the 
strength and music of the English language. But 
it was not made by one man, or at one time; but 
centuries and churches brought it to perfection. | 
There never was a time when there was not some | 
translation existing. The Liturgy, admired for its 
energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of 
ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and 
forms of the Catholic church, — these collected, 
too, in long periods, from the prayers and medita- 
tions of every saint and sacred writer all over the 
world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect 
to the Lord’s Prayer, that the single clauses of 
which it is composed were already in use in the 
time of Christ, in the Rabbinical forms. He 
picked out the grains of gold. The nervous lan- 
guage of the Common Law, the impressive forms 
of our courts and the precision and substantial 
truth of the legal distinctions, are the contribution 
of all the sharp-sighted, strong-minded men who 
have lived in the countries where these laws gov- 
ern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excel-|/ 
lence by being translation on translation. There 
never was a time when there was none. All the 
truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept, and 
all others successively picked out and thrown away. 


192 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Something like the same process had gone on, long 
before, with the originals of these books. The 
world takes liberties with world- books. Vedas, 
Esop’s Fables, Pilpay, Arabian Nights, Cid, li- 
ad, Robin Hood, Scottish Minstrelsy, are not the 
work of single men. In the composition of such 
works the time thinks, the market thinks, the ma- 
son, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the 
fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time 
with one good word ; every municipal law, every 
trade, every folly of the day? and the generic cath- 
olic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his 
originality to the originality of all, stands with the 
next age as the recorder and embodiment of his 
own. 

We have to thank the researches of antiquaries, 
and the Shakspeare Society, for ascertaining the 
steps of the English drama, from the Mysteries 
celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the 
final detachment from the church, and the comple- 
tion of secular plays, from Ferrex and Porrex, and 
Gammer Gurton’s Needle, down to the possession 
of the stage by the very pieces which Shakspeare 
altered, remodelled and finally made his own. 
Elated with success and piqued by the growing 
interest of the problem, they have left no book- 
stall unsearched, no chest in a garret unopened, 
no file of old yellow accounts to decompose in 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 193 


damp and worms, so keen was the hope to dis- 
cover whether the boy Shakspeare poached or not, 
whether he held horses at the theatre door, whether 
he kept school, and why he left in his will only his 
second-best bed to Ann Hathaway, his wife. 

There is somewhat touching in the madness with 
which the passing age mischooses the object on 
which all candles shine and all eyes are turned ; 
the care with which it registers every trifle touch- 
ing Queen Elizabeth and King James, and the 
Essexes, Leicesters, Burleighs and Buckinghams ; 
and lets pass without a single valuable note the 
founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause 
the Tudor dynasty to be remembered, — the man 
who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspira- 
tion which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the 
foremost people of the world are now for some ages 
to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not 
another bias. A popular player ;— nobody sus- 
pected he was the poet of the human race; and the 
secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intel- 
lectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people. 
Bacon, who took the inventory of the human un-/ 
derstanding for his times, never mentioned his 
name. Ben Jonson, though we have strained his 
few words of regard and panegyric, had no suspi- 
cion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he 
was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise 


VOL. Iv. 13 


194 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed 
himself, out of all question, the better poet of the 
two. 

If it need wit to know wit, according to the prov- 
erb, Shakspeare’s time should be capable of recog- 
nizing it. Sir Henry Wotton was born four years 
after Shakspeare, and died twenty-three years after 
him; and I find, among his correspondents and 
acquaintances, the following persons: Theodore 
Beza, Isaac Casaubon, Sir Philip Sidney, the 
Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, 
John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. 
Donne, Abraham Cowley, Bellarmine, Charles 
Cotton, John Pym, John Hales, Kepler, Vieta, Al- 
bericus Gentilis, Paul Sarpi, Arminius; with all 
of whom exists some token of his having commu- 
nicated, without enumerating many others whom 
doubtless he saw, —Shakspeare, Spenser, Jonson, 
Beaumont, Massinger, the two Herberts, Marlow, 
Chapman and the rest. “Since the constellation of 
great men who appeared in Greece in the time of 
Pericles, there was never any such society )}— yet 
their genius failed them to find out the best head 
in the universe. Our poet’s mask was impenetra- 
ble. You cannot see the mountain near. It took 
-a century to make it suspected ; and not until two 
centuries had passed, after his death, did any criti- 
‘cism which we think adequate begin to appear. It 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 195 


was not possible to write the history of Shakspeare 
till now; for he is the father of German literature : 
it was with the introduction of Shakspeare into 
German, by Lessing, and the translation of his 
works by Wieland and Schlegel, that the rapid , 
burst of German literature was most intimately ) 
connected. It was not until the nineteenth cen- 
tury, whose speculative genius is a sort of living 
Hamlet, that the tragedy of Hamlet could find 
such wondering readers. Now, literature, philoso- 
phy and thought, are Shakspearized. His mind 
is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do 
not see. Our ears are educated to music by his 
rhythm. (Coleridge and Goethe are the only crit- 
ics who have expressed our convictions with any 
adequate fidelity): but there is in all cultivated 
minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power 
and beauty, which, like Christianity, qualifies the 
period. 

The Shakspeare Society have inquired in all di- 
rections, advertised the missing facts, offered money 
for any information that will lead to proof, — and 
with what result? Beside some important illustra- 
tion of the history of the English stage, to which I 
have adverted, they have gleaned a few facts 
touching the property, and dealings in regard to 
property, of the poet. It appears that from year 
to year he owned a larger share in the Blackfriars’ 


196 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Theatre: its wardrobe and other appurtenances 
were his: that he bought an estate in his native vil- 
lage with his earnings as writer and shareholder ; 
that he lived in the best house in Stratford ; was 
intrusted by his neighbors with their commissions 
in London, as of borrowing money, and the like ; 
that he was a veritable farmer. About the time 
when he was writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rog- 
ers, in the borough-court of Stratford, for thirty- 
five shillings, ten pence, for corn delivered to him 
at different times; and in all respects appears as a 
good husband, with no reputation for eccentricity 
or excess. He was a good-natured sort of man, 
an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any 
striking manner distinguished from other actors 
and managers. I admit the importance of this in- 
formation. It was well worth the pains that have 
been taken to procure it. 

But whatever scraps of information concerning 
his condition these researches may have rescued, 
they can shed no light upon that infinite invention 
which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for 
us. We are very clumsy writers of history. We 
tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birth-place, 
schooling, school-mates, earning of money, mar- 
riage, publication of books, celebrity, death ; and 
when we have come to an end of this gossip, no 
ray of relation appears between it and the goddess 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POE’ 197 


born ; and it seems as if, had we dipped at random 
into the ‘‘ Modern Plutarch,” and read any other 
life there, it would have fitted the poems as well. 
It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rain- 
bow daughter of Wonder, from the invisible, to 
abolish the past and refuse all history. Malone, 
Warburton, Dyce and Collier, have wasted their oil. 
The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, 
the Park and Tremont have vainly assisted. Bet- 
terton, Garrick, Kemble, Kean and Macready ded- 
icate their lives to this genius; him they crown, 
elucidate, obey and express. The genius knows 
them not. ‘The recitation begins; one golden word 
leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry 
and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own 
inaccessible homes. JI remember I went once to 
see the Hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of 
the English stage ; and all I then heard and all I 


now remember of the tragedian was that in which | / 


the tragedian had no part; simply Hamlet’s ques- 
tion to the ghost : — 
“What may this mean, | 

That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel | 

Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon ? ” 
That imagination which dilates the closet he writes 
in to the world’s dimension, crowds it with agents 
in rank and order, as quickly reduces the big real- 
ity to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks 


198 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green- 
room. Can any biography shed light on the local- 
ities into which the Midsummer Night’s Dream ad- 
mits me? Did Shakspeare confide to any notary 
or parish recorder, sacristan, or surrogate in Strat- 
ford, the genesis of that delicate creation? The 
forest of Arden, the nimble air of Scone Castle, 
the moonlight of Portia’s villa, “‘ the antres vast 
and desarts idle” of Othello’s captivity, — where 
is the third cousin, or grand-nephew, the chancel- 
lor’s file of accounts, or private letter, that has 
kept one word of those transcendent secrets? In 
fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art, — 
in the Cyclopezan architecture of Egypt and India, 
in the Phidian sculpture, the Gothic minsters, the 
Italian painting, the Ballads of Spain and Scot- 
land, — the Genius draws up the ladder after him, 
when the creative age goes up to heaven, and gives 
way to a new age, which sees the works and asks 
in vain for a history. 


Shakspeare_is__the only _biographer—of Shak. 


/) speare ; and even he can tell nothing, except to the 





Shakspeare in us, that is, to our most apprehen- 
sive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from 
off his tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspi- 
rations. Read the antique documents extricated, 
analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dyce 
and Collier, and now read one of these skyey 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. q 199 


sentences, — aerolites, — which seem to have fallen 
out of heaven, and which not your experience but 
the man within the breast has accepted as words 
of fate, and tell me if they match; if the former 
account in any manner for the latter; or which 
gives the most historical insight into the man. 
Hence, though our external history is so meagre, 
yet, with Shakspeare for biographer, instead of 
Aubrey and Rowe, we have really the information 
which is material ; that which deseribes character 
and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet 
the man and deal with him, would most import 
us to know. We have his recorded convictions 
on those questions which knock for answer at every 
heart, —on life and death, on love, on wealth and 
poverty, on the prizes of life and the ways whereby 
we come at them; on the characters of men, and 
the influences, occult and open, which affect their 
fortunes; and on those mysterious and demoniacal 
powers which defy our science and which yet in- 
terweave their malice and their gift in our bright- 
est hours. Who ever read the volume of the 
Sonnets without finding that the poet had there 
revealed, under masks that are no masks to the 
intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love; the 
confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible, 
and, at the same time, the most intellectual of 
men? What trait of his private mind has he 


200 « REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his 
ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, 
what forms and humanities pleased him; his de- 
light in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in 
cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let 
Antonio the merchant answer for his great heart. 
_So far from Shakspeare’s being the least known, 
he is the one person, in all modern history, known 
to us. What point of morals, of manners, of 
economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of 
the conduct of life, has he not settled? What 
mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? 
What office, or function, or district of man’s 
work, has he not remembered? What king has 
he not taught state,as Talma taught Napoleon ? 
What maiden has not found him finer than her 
delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? 
What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman 
has he not instructed in the rudeness of his be- 
havior ? 
Some able and appreciating critics think no 
eriticism on Shakspeare valuable that does not 
rest purely on the dramatic merit; that he is 
falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think 
p28 highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, 
,2but still think it _secondary. He was a full man, 
(who liked to talk; a brain exhaling thoughts and 
images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 201 


at hand. Had he been less, we should have had 
to consider how well he filled his place, how good 
a dramatist he was,—and he is the best in the 
world. But it turns out that what he has to 
say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention 
from the vehicle; and he is like some saint whose 
history is to be rendered into all languages, into 
verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut 
up into proverbs ; so that the occasion which gave 
the saint’s meaning the form of a conversation, or 
of a prayer, or of a code of laws, is immaterial, 
compared with the universality of its application.’ 
So it fares with the wise Shakspeare and his book 
of life. He wrote the airs for all our modern’ 
music: he wrote the text of modern life; the text 
of manners: he drew the man of England and 
Europe; the father of the man in America; he 
drew the man, and described. the day, and what is 
done in it: he read the hearts of men and women, 
their probity, and their second thought and wiles ; 
the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by 
which virtues and vices slide into their contraries : 
he could divide the mother’s part from the father’s 
part in the face of the child, or draw the fine 
demareations of freedom and of fate: he knew 
the laws of repression which make the police of 
nature: and all the sweets and all the terrors of 
human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly . 


202 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 

as the landscape lies on the eye. And the impor- 
tance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of 
Drama or Epic, out of notice. * Tis like making 
a question concerning the paper on which a king’s 
message is written. 

Shakspeare is as much out of the category of 
eminent authors, as he is out of the crowd. He 
is inconceivably wise ; the others, conceivably. A 
‘good reader can, in a sort, nestle into Plato’s brain 
dand think from thence ; but not into Shakspeare’s. 
We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, 
for creation, Shakspeare is unique. No man can 
imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of 
subtlety compatible with an individual self,— the 
subtilest of authors, and only just within the pos- 
sibility of authorship. With this wisdom of ‘of _life_ 
is the equal endowment of imaginative ive and of 
lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his 
legend with form and sentiments as if they were 
people who had lived under his roof; and few 
real men have left such distinct characters as these 
fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet 
as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him , 
into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string.)| 
An omnipresent humanity co-ordinates all his fac- 
\ulties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and 
‘his partiality will presently appear. He has cer: 
‘tain observations, opinions, topics, which have 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 2038 


some accidental prominence, and which he dis-\ 
poses all to exhibit. He crams this part and 
starves that other part, consulting not the fitness | 
of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But |! 
Shakspeare has no peculiarity, no importunate | 
topic; but all is duly given; no veins, no curiosi-_ 
ties; no cow-painter, no bird-fancier, no manner-, 
ist is he: he has no discoverable egotism: the’ 
creat he tells greatly; the small subordinately. | 
He is wise without emphasis or assertion; he is/ 
strong, as nature is strong, who lifts the land into | 
mountain slopes without effort and by the same, 
rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as 
well to do the one as the other. This makes that 
equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative and 
love-songs; a merit so incessant that each reader; 
is incredulous of the perception of other readers. 
This power of expression, or of transferring the 
inmost truth of things into music and verse, makes 
him the type of the poet and has added a new 
problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws 
him into natural history, as a main production of 
the globe, and as announcing new eras and amelio- 
rations. Things were mirrored in his poetry with- 
out loss or blur: he could paint the fine with pre- 
cision, the great with compass, the tragic and the 
comic indifferently and without any distortion or 
favor. He carried his powerful execution inte 


204 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


minute details, to a hair point; finishes an eyelash 
or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain; and 
yet these, like nature’s, will bear the scrutiny of 
the solar microscope. 

In short, he is the chief example to prove that 
more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, 
is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make 
one picture. Daguerre learned how to let one 
flower etch its image on his plate of iodine, and 
then proceeds at leisure to etch a million. There 
are always objects; but there was never represen- 
tation. Here is perfect representation, at last; and 
now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. 
No recipe can be given for the making of a Shaks- 
‘peare ; but the possibility of the translation of 
‘things into song is demonstrated. 

His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. 
The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the 
splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they; 
and it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of 
the piece; like the tone of voice of some incom- 
parable person, so is this a speech of poetic beings, 
and any clause as unproducible now as a whole 
poem. 

Though the speeches in the plays, and single 
lines, have a beauty which tempts the ear to pause 
on them for their euphuism, yet the sentence is 
so loaded with meaning and so linked with its 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 205 


foregoers and followers, that the logician is satis- 
fied. His means are as admirable as his ends; 
every subordinate invention, by which he helps 
himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, 
is a poem too. He is not reduced to dismount and 
walk because his horses are running off with him 
in some distant direction : he always rides. 

The finest poetry was first experience; but the 
thought has suffered a transformation since it was 
anexperience. Cultivated men often attain a good 
degree of skill in writing verses; but it is easy to 
read, through their poems, their personal history : 
any one acquainted with the parties can name every 
figure ; this is Andrew and that is Rachel. The 
sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar 
with wings, and not yet a butterfly. In the poet’s 
mind the fact has gone quite over into the new 
element of thought, and has lost all that is exuvial. 
This generosity abides with Shakspeare. We say, ° 
from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he 
knows the lesson by heart. Yet there is not a 
trace of egotism. 

One more royal trait properly belongs to the 
poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no 
man can be a poet, — for beauty is his aim. He 
loves virtue, not for its obligation but for its grace: 
he delights in the world, in man, in woman, for the 
lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the 


206 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the uni- 
verse. Epicurus relates that poetry hath such 
charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to 
partake of them. And the true bards have been 
noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer 
lies in sunshine; Chaucer is glad and erect; and 
Saadi says, “It was rumored abroad that I was 
penitent ; but what had I to do with repentance ? ” 
Not less sovereign and cheerful, — much more sov- 
ereign and cheerful, is the tone of Shakspeare. 
His name suggests joy and emancipation to the 
heart of men. If he should appear in any com- 
pany of human souls, who would not march in his 
troop? He touches nothing that does not borrow 
health and longevity from his festal style. 


And now, how stands the account of man with 
this bard and benefactor, when, in solitude, shut- 
ting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we 
seek to strike the balance? Solitude has austere 
lessons ; it can teach us to spare both heroes and 
poets; and it weighs Shakspeare also, and finds him 
to share the halfness and imperfection of humanity. 

| Shakspeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, saw the 
\splendor of meaning that plays over the visible 
‘world ; knew that a tree had another use than for 
( apples, and corn another than for meal, and the 
/ball of the earth, than for tillage and roads: thas 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 207 


these things bore a second and finer harvest to the 
mind, being emblems of its thoughts, and convey- 
ing in all their natural history a certain mute 
commentary on human life. Shakspeare employed 
them as colors to compose his picture. He rested 
in their beauty ; and never took the step which 
seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore 
the virtue which resides in these symbols and im- 
parts this power : — what is that which they them- 
selves say? He converted the elements which 
waited on his command, into entertainments. He 
was master of the revels to mankind. Is it not as 
if one should have, through majestic powers of 
science, the comets given into his hand, or the 
planets and their moons, and should draw them 
from their orbits to glare with the municipal fire- 
works on a holiday night, and advertise in all 
towns, “ Very superior pyrotechny this evening ”’ ? 
Are the agents of nature, and the power to under- 
stand them, worth no more than a street serenade, 
or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again 
the trumpet-text in the Koran,— ‘The heavens 
and the earth and all that is between them, think 
ye we have created them in jest?” As long as the 
question is of talent and mental power, the world 
of men has not his equal to show. But when the 
question is, to life and its materials and its auxili- 
aries, how does he profit me? What does it sig 


208 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


nify? Itis but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer- 
Night’s Dream, or Winter Evening’s Tale: what sig- 
nifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian 
verdict of the Shakspeare Societies comes to mind ; 
that he was a jovial actor and. manager. I can not 
marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men 
have led lives in some sort of keeping with their 
thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he 
been less, had he reached only the common measure 
of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, 
we might leave the fact in the twilight of human 
. fate: but that this man of men, he who gave to the 
| science of mind a new and larger subject than had 
_) ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity 
Ssome furlongs forward into Chaos,— that he should 
‘not be wise for himself ;— it must even go into the 
world’s history that the best poet led an obscure 
and profane life, using his genius for the public 
amusement. 

Well, other men, priest and prophet, Israelite, 
German and Swede, beheld the same objects: they 
also saw through them that which was contained. 
And to what purpose? The beauty straightway 
vanished ; they read commandments, all-excluding 
mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of 
piled mountains, fell on them, and life became 
ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim’s progress, a probation, 
beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam’s 


SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET. 209 


fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and pur- 
gatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart 
of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in 
them. 

It must be conceded that these are half-views of 
half-men. The world still wants its poet-priest, a 
reconciler, who shall not trifle,with Shakspeare the 
player, nor shall grope in graves,with Swedenborg 
the mourner; but who shall see, speak, and act, with 
equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten 
‘the sunshine ; right is more beautiful than private 
affection; and love is compatible with universal 


wisdom. 
VOL. IV. 14 





NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE 
WORLD. 





VL 
NAPOLEON: OR, THE MAN OF THE 
WORLD. 





AmoneG the eminent persons of the nineteenth 
century, Bonaparte is far the best known and the 
most powerful; and owes his predominance to 
the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of 
thought and belief, the aims of the masses of 
active and cultivated men. It is Swedenborg’s 
theory that every organ is made up of homogene- 
ous particles; or as it is sometimes expressed, 
every whole is made of similars; that is, the lungs 
are composed of infinitely small lungs; the liver, 
of infinitely small livers; the kidney, of little 
kidneys, &c. Following this analogy, if any man 
is found to carry with him the power and affec- 
tions of vast numbers, if Napoleon is France, if 
Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom 
he sways are little Napoleons. 

In our society there is a standing antagonism 
between the conservative and the democratic 
classes; between those who have made their 


914 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


fortunes, and the young and the poor who have 
fortunes to make; between the interests of dead 
labor, — that is, the labor of hands long ago still 
in the grave, which labor is now entombed in 
money stocks, or in land and buildings owned by 
idle capitalists, — and the interests of living labor, 
which seeks to possess itself of land and buildings 
and money stocks. The first class is timid, self- 
ish, illiberal, hating innovation, and continually 
losmg numbers by death. The second class is 
selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying, always 
outnumbering the other and recruiting its num- 
bers every hour by births. It desires to keep 
open every avenue to the competition of all, and 
to multiply avenues: the class of business men in 
America, in England, in France and throughout 
Europe; the class of industry and skill. Napo- 
leon is its representative. The instinct of ac- 
tive, brave, able men, throughout the middle class 
every where, has pointed out Napoleon as the in- 
carnate Democrat. He had their virtues and their 
vices; above all, he had their spirit or aim. That 
tendency is material, pointing at a sensual suc- 
cess and employing the richest and most various 
means to that end; conversant with mechanical 
powers, highly intellectual, widely and accurately 
learned and skilful, but subordinating all intel. 
lectual and spiritual forces into means to a mate- 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 215 


rial suecess. To be the rich man, is the end. 
“God has granted,” says the Koran, “to every 
people a prophet in its own tongue.” Paris and 
London and New York, the’ spirit of commerce, of 
money and material power, were also to have their 
prophet; and Bonaparte was qualified and sent. 
Every one of the million readers of anecdotes 
or memoirs or lives of Napoleon, delights in the 
page, because he studies in it his own history. 
Napoleon is thoroughly modern, and, at the high- 
est point of his fortunes, has the very spirit of 
the newspapers. He is no saint,—-to use his 


? 


own word, “no capuchin,” and he is no hero, in 
the high sense. The man in the street finds in 
him the qualities and powers of other men in the 
street. He finds him, like himself, by birth a 
citizen, who, by very intelligible merits, arrived 
at such a commanding position that he could in- 
dulge all those tastes which the common man 
possesses but is obliged to conceal and deny: 
good society, good books, fast travelling, dress, 
dinners, servants without number, personal weight, 
the execution of his ideas, the standing in the 
attitude of a benefactor to all persons about him, 
the refined enjoyments of pictures, statues, music, 
palaces and conventional honors, — precisely what 
is agreeable to the heart of every man in the nine- 
teenth century, this powerful man possessed. 


216 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


It is true that a man of Napoleon’s truth of 
adaptation to the mind of the masses around him, 
becomes not merely representative but actually a 
monopolizer and usurper of other minds. / Thus 
Mirabeau plagiarized every good thought, every 
good word that was spoken in France. |) Dumont 
relates that he sat in the gallery of the Conven- 
tion and heard Mirabeau make a speech. It 
struck Dumont that he could fit it with a pero- 
ration, which he wrote in pencil immediately, and 
showed it to Lord Elgin, who sat by him. Lord 
Elgin approved it, and Dumont, in the evening, 
showed it to Mirabeau. Mirabeau read it, pro- 
nounced it admirable, and declared he would in- 
corporate it into his harangue to-morrow, to the 
Assembly. ‘It is impossible,” said Dumont, “as, 
unfortunately, I have shown it to Lord Elgin.” 
“Tf you have shown it to Lord Elgin and to fifty 
persons beside, I shall still speak it to-morrow: ” 
and he did speak it, with much effect, at the next 
day’s session. For Mirabeau, with his overpower- 
ing personality, felt that these things which his 
presence inspired were as much his own as if he 
had said them, and that his adoption of them 
gave them their weight. Much more absolute and 
centralizing was the successor to Mirabeau’s popu- 
larity and to much more than his predominance 
in France. Indeed, a man of Napoleon’s stamp 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 217 


almost ceases to have a private speech and opin- 
ion. He is so largely receptive, and is so placed, . 
that he comes to be a bureau for all the intelli-) 
gence, wit and power of the age and country. He 
gains the battle; he makes the code; he makes 
the system of weights and measures; he levels the 
Alps; he builds the road. All distinguished en- 
gineers, savans, statists, report to him: so likewise 
do all good heads in every kind: he adopts the 
best measures, sets his stamp on them, and not 
these alone, but on every happy and memorable 
expression. Every sentence spoken by Napoleon | 
and every line of his writing, deserves reading, | 
as it is the sense of France. | 

Bonaparte was the idol of common men because 
he had in transcendent degree the qualities and 
powers of common men. There is a certain satis- 
faction in coming down to the lowest ground of 
politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy. 
Bonaparte wrought, in common with that great 
class he represented, for power and wealth, — but 
Bonaparte, specially, without any scruple as to the 
means. All the sentiments which embarrass men’s 
pursuit of these objects, he set aside. The senti- 
ments were for women and children. Fontanes, in 
1804, expressed Napoleon’s own sense, when in be- 
half of the Senate he addressed him, — “ Sire, the 
desire of perfection is the worst disease that ever 


218 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


afflicted the human mind.” The advocates of lib- 
erty and of progress are ‘“ ideologists ;’’ —a word 
of contempt often in his mouth ; — “ Necker is an 
ideologist:”’ “* Lafayette is an ideologist.”’ | 

An Italian proverb, too well known, declares 
that “if you would succeed, you_must not be too 


\, good.” It is an advantage, within certain limits, to 


have renounced the dominion of the sentiments of 
piety, gratitude and generosity : since what was an 
impassable bar to us, and still is to others, becomes 
a convenient weapon for our purposes ; just as the 
river which was a formidable barrier, winter trans- 
forms into the smoothest of roads. 

Napoleon renounced, once for all, sentiments and 
affections, and would help himself with his hands 
and his head. With him is no miracle and no 
magic. He is a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, 
in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money and in 
troops, and a very consistent and wise master-work- 
man. He is never weak and literary, but acts with 
the solidity and the precision of natural agents. 
He has not lost his native sense and sympathy with 
things. Men give way before such a man, as be- 
fore natural events. To be sure there are men 
enough who are immersed in things, as farmers, 
smiths, sailors and mechanics generally; and we 
know how real and solid such men appear in the 
presence of scholars and grammarians: but these 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 219 


men ordinarily lack the power of arrangement, and 
are like hands without a head. But Bonaparte su- 
peradded to this mineral and animal force, insight 
and generalization, so that men saw in him com- 
bined the natural and the intellectual power, as if 
the sea and land had taken flesh and begun to ci- 
pher. Therefore the land and sea seem to presup- 
pose him. He came unto his own and they re- 
ceived him. This ciphering operative knows what 
he is working with and what is the product. He 
knew the properties of gold and iron, of wheels and 
ships, of troops and diplomatists, and required that 
each should do after its kind. 

The art of war was the game in which he exerted 
his arithmetic. It consisted, according to him, in 
having always more forces than the enemy, on the 
point where the enemy is attacked, or where he at- 
tacks: and his whole talent is strained by endless 
mancuvre and evolution, to march always on the 
enemy at an angle, and destroy his forces in detail. 
It is obvious that a very small force, skilfully and 
rapidly maneuvring so as always to bring two men 
against one at the point of engagement, will be an 
overmatch for a much larger body of men. 

The times, his constitution and his early circum- 
stances combined to develop this pattern democrat. 
He had the virtues of his class and the conditions 
for their activity. That common-sense which no 


220 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


sooner respects any end than it finds the means te 
effect it; the delight in the use of means; in the 
choice, simplification and combining of means; the 
directness and thoroughness of his work; the pru- 
dence with which all was seen and the energy with 
which all was done, make him the natural organ 
and head of what I may almost call, from its ex- 
tent, the modern party. 

Nature must have far the greatest share in every 
success, and so in his. Such a man was wanted, 
and such a man was born; aman of stone and 
iron, capable of sitting on horseback sixteen or sev- 
enteen hours, of going many days together without 
rest or food except by snatches, and with the speed 
and spring of a tiger in action; a man not embar- 
rassed by any scruples; compact, instant, selfish, 
prudent, and of a perception which did not suffer 
itself to be baulked or misled by any pretences of 
others, or any superstition or any heat or haste of 
his own. ‘My hand of iron” he said, “was not at 
the extremity of my arm, it was immediately con- 
nected with my head.” He respected the power 
of nature and fortune, and ascribed to it his su- 
periority, instead of valuing himself, like inferior 
men, on his opinionativeness, and waging war with 
nature. His favorite rhetoric lay in allusion to his 
star ; and he pleased himself, as well as the people, 
when he styled himself the “Child of Destiny.” 


’ 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 221 


“They charge me,” he said, “ with the commission 
of great crimes: men of my stamp do not commit 
erimes. Nothing has been more simple than my 
elevation, tis in vain to ascribe it to intrigue or 
crime ; it was owing to the peculiarity of the times 
and to my reputation of having fought well against 
the enemies of my country. I have always marched 
with the opinion of great masses and with events. 
Of what use then would crimes be to me?” Again 
he said, speaking of his son, “ My son can not re- 
place me; I could not replace myself. I am the 
creature, of circumstances.” 

He had a directness of action never before com- 
bined with so much comprehension. He is a real- 
ist, terrific to all talkers and confused truth-obscur- 
ing persons. He sees where the matter hinges, 
throws himself on the precise point of resistance, 
and slights all other considerations. He is strong 
in the right manner, namely by insight. He never 
blundered into victory, but won his battles in his 
head before he won them on the field. His prin- 
cipal means are in himself. He asks counsel of no 
other. In 1796 he writes to the Directory: “I 
have conducted the campaign without consulting 
any one. [should have done no good if I had been 
under the necessity of conforming to the notions of 
another person. I have gained some advantages 
over superior forces and when totally destitute of 


99? REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


every thing, because, in the persuasion that your 
confidence was reposed in me, my actions were as 
prompt as my thoughts.” | 

History is full, down to this day, of the imbecil- 
ity of kings and governors. They are a class of 
persons much to be pitied, for they know not what 
they should do. The weavers strike for bread, and 
the king and his ministers, knowing not what to 
do, meet them with bayonets. But Napoleon un- 
derstood his business. Here was a man who in 
each moment and emergency knew what to do next. 
It is an immense comfort and refreshment to the 
spirits, not only of kings, but of citizens. Few 
men have any next; they live from hand to mouth, 
without plan, and are ever at the end of their line, 
and after each action wait for an impulse from 
abroad. Napoleon had been the first man of the 
world, if his ends had been purely public. As he 
is, he inspires confidence and vigor by the extraor- 
dinary unity of his action. He is firm, sure, self- 
denying, self-postponing, sacrificing every thing, — 
money, troops, generals, and his own safety also, 
to his aim; not misled, like common adventurers, 
by the splendor of his own means. ‘“ Incidents 
ought not to govern policy,” he said, “ but policy, 
incidents.” ‘To be hurried away by every event 
is to have no political system at all.” His vic 
torles were only so many doors, and he never for a 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 223 


moment lost sight of his way onward, in the daz 
zle and uproar of the present circumstance. He 
knew what to do, and he flew to his mark. He 
would shorten a straight line to come at his object. 
Horrible anecdotes may no doubt be collected from 
his history, of the price at which he bought his suc. 
cesses ; but he must not therefore be set down as 
cruel, but only as one who knew no impediment to 
his will; not bloodthirsty, not cruel, — but woe to 
what thing or person stood in his way! Not blood- 
thirsty, but not sparing of blood,— and pitiless. 
He saw only the object: the obstacle must give 
way. ‘Sire, General Clarke can not combine with 
General Junot, for the dreadful fire of the Aus- 
trian battery.” — ‘Let him carry the battery.” 
— ‘Sire, every regiment that approaches the heavy 
artillery is sacrificed : Sire, what orders ?””— “ For- 
ward, forward!” Seruzier, a colonel of artillery, 
gives, in his ‘¢ Military Memoirs,” the following 
sketch of a scene after the battle of Austerlitz. — 
* At the moment in which the Russian army was 
making its retreat, painfully, but in good order, on 
the ice of the lake, the Emperor Napoleon came 
riding at full speed toward the artillery. “You 
are losing time,” he cried; “fire upon those masses ; 
they must be engulfed: fire upon the ice!” The 
order remained unexecuted for ten’ minutes. In 
vain several officers and myself were placed on the 


Q24 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


slope of a hill to produce the effect: their balls and 
mine rolled upon the ice without breaking it up. 
Seeing that, I tried a simple method of elevating 
light howitzers. The almost perpendicular fall of 
the heavy projectiles produced the desired effect. 
My method was immediately followed by the ad- 
joining batteries, and in less than no time we bur- 
ied”’ some ! “thousands of Russians and Austrians 
under the waters of the lake.” 

In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle 
seemed to vanish. ‘There shall be no Alps,” he 
said ; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by 
graded galleries their steepest precipices, until Italy 
was as open to Paris as any town in France. He 
laid his bones to, and wrought for his crown. Hav- 
ing decided what was to be done, he did that with 
might and main. He put out all his strength. He 
risked every thing and spared nothing, neither am- 
munition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor 
himself. 

We like to see every thing do its office after its 
{ ‘kind, whether it be a milch-cow or a rattle-snake ; 
and if fighting be the best mode of adjusting 
national differences, (as large majorities of men 
seem to agree, ) certainly Bonaparte was right in 
making it thorough. The grand principle of war, 


1 As I quote at second hand, and cannot procure Seruzier, 
{ dare not adopt the high figure I find. 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 225 


he said, was that an army ought always to be ready, 
by day and by night and at all hours, to make all 
the resistance it is capable of making. He never 
economized his ammunition, but, on a hostile posi- 
tion, rained a torrent of iron, — shells, balls, grape. 
shot, — to annihilate all defence. On any point 
of resistance he concentrated squadron on squad- 
ron in overwhelming numbers until it was swept 
out of existence. To a regiment of horse-chas- 
seurs at Lobenstein, two days before the battle of 
Jena, Napoleon said, ‘“‘ My lads, you must not fear 
death ; when soldiers brave death, they drive him 
into the enemy’s ranks.” In the fury of assault, 
he no more spared himself. He went to the edge 
of his possibility. It is plain that in Italy he did 
what he could, and all that he could. He came, 
several times, within an inch of ruin; and his own 
person was all but lost. He was flung into the 
marsh at Arcola. The Austrians were between him 
and his troops, in the mélée, and he was brought 
off with desperate efforts. At Lonato, and at other 
places, he was on the point of being taken prisoner. 
He fought sixty battles. He had never enough. 
Each victory was a new weapon. ‘My power 
would fall, were I not to support it by new achieve- 
ments. Conquest has made me what I am, and 
| conquest must maintain me.” He felt, with every 


wise man, that as much life is needed for conserva 
VOL. IV. 15 


226 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


tion as for creation. We are always in peril, 
always in a bad plight, just on the edge of destruc- 
tion and only to be saved by invention and courage. 
This vigor was guarded and tempered by the 
coldest prudence and punctuality. A thunderbolt 
in the attack, he was found invulnerable in his 
intrenchments. His very attack was never the in- 
spiration of courage, but the result of calculation. 
His idea of the best defence consists in being still 
the attacking party. “My ambition,” he says, 
“was great, but was of a cold nature.” In one 
of his conversations with Las Casas, he remarked, 
“As to moral courage, I have rarely met with the 
two-o’clock-in-the-morning kind: I mean unpre- 
pared courage; that which is necessary on an un- 
expected occasion, and which, in spite of the most 
unforeseen events, leaves full freedom of judgment 
and decision:” and he did not hesitate to declare 
that he was himself eminently endowed with this 
two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage, and that he 
had met with few persons equal to himself in this 
respect. . oT ak 
Every thing depended on the nicety of his com- 
binations, and the stars were not more punctual 
than his arithmetic. His personal attention de- 
scended to the smallest particulars. ‘ At Monte- 
bello, I ordered Kellermanu to attack with eight 
hundred horse, and with these he separated the 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN CF THE WORLD. 227 


six thousand Hungarian grenadiers, before the very 
eyes of the Austrian cavalry. This cavalry was 
half a league off and required a quarter of an 
hour to arrive on the field of action, and I have 
observed that it is always these quarters of an hour 
that decide the fate of a battle.” “ Before he 
fought a battle, Bonaparte thought little about 
what he should do in case of success, but a great 
deal about what he should do in case of a reverse 
of fortune.’ The same prudence and good sense 
mark all his behavior. His instructions to his 
secretary at the Tuileries are worth remembering. 
“ During the night, enter my chamber as seldom as) 
possible. Do not awake me when you have any 
good news to communicate; with that there is no 
hurry. But when you bring bad news, rouse me 
instantly, for then there is not a moment to be 
lost.” It was a whimsical economy of the same 
kind which dictated his practice, when general in 
Italy, in regard to his burdensome correspondence. 
He directed Bourrienne to leave all letters unopened) 
for three weeks, and then observed with satisfac- 
tion how large a part of the correspondence had 
thus disposed of itself and no longer required an _ 
answer. His achievement of business was immense, 
and enlarges the known powers of man. There 
have been many working kings, from Ulysses to 
William of Orange, but none who accomplished a 
tithe of this man’s performance. 


228 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


To these gifts of nature, Napoleon added the ad- 
vantage of having been born toa private and hum- 
ble fortune. In his later days he had the weakness 
of wishing to add to his crowns and badges the pre- 
scription of aristocracy ; but he knew his debt to 
his austere education, and made no secret of his 
contempt for the born kings, and for “ the heredi- 
tary asses,” as he coarsely styled the Bourbons. 
He said that “in their exile they had learned noth- 
ing, and forgot nothing.” Bonaparte had passed 
through all the degrees of military service, but also 
was citizen before he was emperor, and so has 
the key to citizenship. His remarks and estimates 
discover the information and justness of measure- 
ment of the middle class. ‘Those who had to deal 
with him found that he was not to be imposed 
upon, but could cipher as well as another man. 
This appears in all parts of his Memoirs, dictated 
at St. Helena. When the expenses of the empress, 
of his household, of his palaces, had accumulated 
great debts, Napoleon examined the bills of the 
creditors himself, detected overcharges and errors, 
and reduced the claims by considerable sums. 

His grand weapon, namely the millions whom he 
directed, he owed to the representative character 
which clothed him. He interests us as he stands 
for France and for Europe; and he exists as cap- 
tain and king only as far as the Revolution, or the 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 229 


interest of the industrious masses, found an organ 
and a leader in him. In the social interests, he 
knew the meaning and value of labor, and threw 
himself naturally on that side. I like an incident 
mentioned by one of his biographers at St. He- 
lena. ‘ When walking with Mrs. Balcombe, some 
servants, carrying heavy boxes, passed by on the 
road, and Mrs. Balcombe desired them, in rather 
an angry tone, to keep back. Napoleon interfered, 
saying ‘ Respect the burden, Madam.’” In the 
time of the empire he directed attention to the im- 
provement and embellishment of the markets of 
the capital. ‘“ The market-place,” he said, “is the 
Louvre of the common people.” The principal 
works that have survived him are his magnificent 
roads. He filled the troops with his spirit, and a 
sort of freedom and companionship grew up be- 
tween him and them, which the forms of his court 
never permitted between the officers and himself. 
They performed, under his eye, that which no 
others could do. The best document of his relation 
to his troops is the order of the day on the morn- 
ing of the battle of Austerlitz, in which Napoleon 
promises the troops that he will keep his person 
out of reach of fire. This declaration, which is the 
reverse of that ordinarily made by generals and 
sovereigns on the eve of a battle, sufficiently ex: 
plains the devotion of the army to their leader. 


230 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


But though there is in particulars this identity 
between Napoleon and the mass of the people, his 
real strength lay in their conviction that he was 
their representative in his genius and aims, not only 
when he courted, but when he controlled, and even 
when he decimated them by‘his conscriptions. He 
knew, as well as any Jacobin in France, how to phi- 
losophize on liberty and equality ; and when allusion 
was made to the precious blood of centuries, which 
was spilled by the killing of the Due d’Enghien, 
he suggested, ‘“ Neither is my blood ditch-water.” 
The people felt that no longer the throne was oc- 
eupied and the land sucked of its nourishment, by 
a small class of legitimates, secluded from all com- 
munity with the children of the soil, and holding 
the ideas and superstitions of a long-forgotten 
state of society. Instead of that vampyre, a man 
of themselves held, in the Tuileries, knowledge and 
ideas like their own, opening of course to them and 
their children all places of power and trust. The 
day of sleepy, selfish policy, ever narrowing the 
means and opportunities of young men, was ended, 
and a day of expansion and demand was come. A 
market for all the powers and productions of man 
was opened ; brilliant prizes glittered in the eyes 
of youth and talent. The old, iron-bound, feudal 
France was changed into a young Ohio or New 
York ; and those who smarted under the immediate 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 231 


rigors of the new monarch, pardoned them as the 
necessary severities of the military system which 
had driven out the oppressor. And even when the 
majority of the people had begun to ask whether 
they had really gained any thing under the exhaust- 
ing levies of men and money of the new master, 
the whole talent of the country, in every rank and 
kindred, took his part and defended him as its nat- 
ural patron. In 1814, when advised to rely on the 
higher classes, Napoleon said to those around him, 
‘“ Gentlemen, in the situation in which I stand, my 
only nobility is the rabble of the Faubourgs.” 
Napoleon met this natural expectation. The 
necessity of his position required a hospitality to 
every sort of talent, and its appointment to trusts ; 
and his feeling went along with this policy. Like 
every superior person, he undoubtedly felt a desire 
for men and compeers, and a wish to measure his 
power with other masters, and an impatience of 
fools and underlings. In Italy, he sought for men 
and found none. “Good God!” he said, “how, | 
rare men are! There are eighteen millions in¢ | 
Italy, and I have with difficulty found two, — ' 
Dandolo and Melzi.” In later years, with larger 
experience, his respect for mankind was not in- 
creased. In a moment of bitterness he said to 
one of his oldest friends, “‘ Men deserve the con- 
tempt with which they inspire me. I have only to 


os 


232 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


put some gold-lace on the coat of my virtuous re- 
publicans and they immediately become just what 
I wish them.” This impatience at levity was, how- 
ever, an oblique tribute of respect to those able 
persons who commanded his regard not only when 
he found them friends and coadjutors but’ also 
when they resisted his will. He could-not con- 
found Fox and Pitt, Carnot, Lafayette and Berna- 
dotte, with the danglers of his court; and in spite 
of the detraction which his systematic egotism dic- 
tated toward the great captains who conquered 
with and for him, ample acknowledgments are 
made by him to Lannes, Duroc, Kleber, Dessaix, 
Massena, Murat, Ney and Augereau. If he felt 
himself their patron and the founder of their for- 
tunes, as when he said “‘ | made my generals out of 
mud,” —he could not hide his satisfaction in re- 
ceiving from them a seconding and support com- 
mensurate with the grandeur of his enterprise. In 
the Russian campaign he was so much impressed by 
the courage and resources of Marshal Ney, that he 
said, “I have two hundred millions in my coffers, 
/ and I would give them all for Ney.” The charac- 
ters which he has drawn of several of his marshals 
are discriminating, and though they did not con- 
tent the insatiable vanity of French officers, are no 
doubt substantially just. And in fact every species 
of merit was sought and advanced under his gov- 


= 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 238 


ernment. “I know” he said, “the depth and 
draught of water of every one of my generals.” 
Natural power was sure to be well received at his 
court. Seventeen men in his time were raised from 
common soldiers to the rank of king, marshal, 
duke, or general; and the crosses of his Legion of 
Honor were given to personal valor, and not to 
family connexion. ‘‘ When soldiers have been bap- 
tized in the fire of a battle-field, they have all one 
rank in my eyes.” 

When a natural king becomes a titular king, 
every body is pleased and satisfied. The Revolu- 
tion entitled the strong populace of the Faubourg 
St. Antoine, and every horse-boy and powder- 
monkey in the army, to look on Napoleon as flesh 
of his flesh and the creature of Ais party: but 
there is something in the success of grand talent 
which enlists an universal sympathy. For in the 
prevalence of sense and spirit over stupidity and 
malversation, all reasonable men have an interest ; 
and as intellectual beings we feel the air purified 
by the electric shock, when material force is over- 
thrown by intellectual energies. As soon as we 
are removed out of the reach of local and acciden- 
tal partialities, Man feels that Napoleon fights for 
him ; these are honest victories; this strong steam- 
engine does our work. Whatever appeals to the 
imagination, by transcending the ordinary limits of 


234 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


human ability, wonderfully encourages and liber: 
ates us. This capacious head, revolving and dis- 
posing sovereignly trains of affairs, and animating 
such multitudes of agents; this eye, which looked 
through Europe; this prompt invention; this inex- 
haustible resource : — what events! what romantic 
pictures! what strange situations !— when spying 
the Alps, by a sunset in the Sicilian sea; drawing 
up his army for battle in sight of the Pyramids, 
and saying to his troops, “‘ From the tops of those 
) pyramids, forty centuries look down on you;” ford- 
“ing the Red Sea; wading in the gulf of the Isth- 
mus of Suez. On the shore of Ptolemais, gigantic 
projects agitated him. “ Had Acre fallen, I should 
have changed the face of the world.” His army, 
on the night of the battle of Austerlitz, which was 
the anniversary of his inauguration as Emperor, 
presented him with a bouquet of forty standards 
taken in the fight. Perhaps it is a little puerile, 
the pleasure he took in making these contrasts 
glaring ; as when he pleased himself with making 
kings wait in his antechambers, at Tilsit, at Paris 
and at Erfurt. 

We cannot, in the universal imbecility, indecis- 
ion and indolence of men, sufficiently congratulate 
ourselves on this strong and ready actor, \who took 
occasion by the beard, jand showed us how much 
may be accomplished by the mere force of such vir- 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 2385, 


tues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by 
punctuality, by personal attention, by courage and 
thoroughness. “ The Austrians” he said, ‘ do not 
know the value of time.” I should cite him, in his 
earlier years, as a model of prudence. His power 
does not consist in any wild or extravagant force ; 
in any enthusiasm like Mahomet’s, or singular 
power of persuasion; but in the exercise of com- 
mon-sense on each emergency, instead of abiding 
by rules and customs. The lesson he teaches is 
that which vigor always teaches ;— that there is 
always room for it. To what heaps of cowardly 
doubts is not that man’s life an answer. When he 
appeared it was the belief of all military men that 
there could be nothing new in war ; as it is the be- 
* lief of men to-day that nothing new can be under- 
taken in politics, or in church, or in letters, or in 
trade, or in farming, or in our social manners and_ 
customs ; and as it is at all times the belief of S0-, 
ciety that the world is used up. But Bonaparte 
knew better than society; and moreover knew that 
he knew better. I think all men know better than) 
they do; know that the institutions we so volublys 
commend are go-carts and baubles; but they dare, 
not trust their presentiments. Bonaparte relied on 
his own sense, and did not care a bean for other 
people’s. The world treated his novelties just as it 
treats everybody’s novelties, — made infinite objec- 


236 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


tion, mustered all the impediments; but he snapped 
his finger at their objections. ‘“ What creates great 
difficulty’ he remarks, “in the profession of the 
land-commander, is the necessity of feeding so 
many men and animals. If he allows himself to be 
guided by the commissaries he will never stir, and 
all his expeditions will fail.” An example of his 
common-sense is what he says of the passage of the 
Alps in winter, which all writers, one repeating 
after the other, had described as impracticable. 
“‘The winter,” says Napoleon, “is not the most 
unfavorable season for the passage of lofty moun- 
tains. The snow is then firm, the weather settled, 
and there is nothing to fear from avalanches, the 
real and only danger to be apprehended in the 
Alps. On those high mountains there are often 
very fine days in December, of a dry cold, with ex- 
treme calmness in the air.” Read his account, too, 
of the way in which battles are gained. “In all 
battles a moment occurs when the bravest troops, 
after having made the greatest efforts, feel inclined 
torun. That terror proceeds from a want of con- 
fidence in their own courage, and it only requires a 
slight opportunity, a pretence, to restore confidence 
to them. The art is, to give rise to the opportu- 
| nity and to invent the pretence. At Arcola I won 
the battle with twenty-five horsemen. I seized that 
moment of lassitude, gave every man a trumpet, 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 237 


and gained the day with this handful. You see» 
that two armies are two bodies which meet and en- 
deavor to frighten each other; a moment of panic 
occurs, and that moment must be turned to advan- 
tage. When a man has been present in many ac- 
tions, he distinguishes that moment without diffi- 
culty: it is as easy as casting up an addition.” 
This deputy of the nineteenth century added 
to his gifts a capacity for speculation on general 
topics. He delighted in running through the 
range of practical, of literary and of abstract ques- 
tions. His opinion is always original and to the 
purpose. On the voyage to Egypt he liked, 
after dinner, to fix on three or four persons to 
support a proposition, and as many to oppose it. 
-He gave a subject, and the discussions turned on 
questions of religion, the different kinds of gov- 
ernment and the art of war. One day he asked 
whether the planets were inhabited? On another, 
what was the age of the world? Then he pro- 
posed to consider the probability of the destruction 
of the globe, either by water or by fire: at an- 
other time, the truth or fallacy of presentiments, 
and the interpretation of dreams. He was very 
fond of talking of religion. In 1806 he conversed 
with Fournier, bishop of Montpellier, on matters 
of theology. There were two points on which they 
could not agree, viz. that of hell, and that of salva 


938 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


tion out of the pale of the church. The Emperor 
told Josephine that he disputed like a devil on 
these two points, on which the bishop was inexora- 
ble. To the philosophers he readily yielded all 
that was proved against religion as the work of 
men and time, but he would not hear of material- 
ism. One fine night, on deck, amid a clatter of 
»materialism, Bonaparte pointed to the stars, and 
/ gsaid, “ You may talk as long as you please, gen- 
/ (tlemen, but who made all that?” He delighted 
in the conversation of men of science, particularly 
of Monge and Berthollet; but the men of let- 
ters he slighted; they were “manufacturers of 
phrases.” Of medicine too he was fond of talk- 
ing, and with those of its practitioners whom he 
most esteemed, — with Corvisart at Paris, and 
with Antonomarchi at St. Helena. ‘ Believe me,” 
he said to the last, ““we had better leave off all 
these remedies: life is a fortress which neither you 
nor I know anything about. Why throw obsta- 
cles in the way of its defence? Its own means 
are superior to all the apparatus of your labora- 
tories. Corvisart candidly agreed with me that all 
your filthy mixtures are good for nothing. Medi- 
cine is a collection of uncertain prescriptions, the 
results of which, taken collectively, are more fatal 
than useful to mankind. Water, air and cleanli- 
ness are the chief articles in my pharmacopeia.’’ 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 239 


His memoirs, dictated to Count Montholon and 
General Gourgaud at St. Helena, have great value, 
after all the deduction that it seems is to be made 
from them on account of his known disingenuous- 
ness. He has the good-nature of strength and 
conscious superiority. I admire his simple, clear 
narrative of his battles;—good as Cesar’s; his 
good-natured and sufficiently respectful account of . 
Marshal Wurmser and his other antagonists ; and 
his own equality as a writer to his varying sub- 
ject. The most agreeable portion is the Campaign 
in Egypt. 

He had hours of thought and wisdom. In in- 
tervals of leisure, either in the camp or the palace, 
Napoleon appears as a man of genius directing 
on abstract questions the native appetite for truth 
and the impatience of words he was wont to show 
in war. He could enjoy every play of invention, 
a romance, a bon mot, as well as a stratagem in a 
campaign. He delighted to fascinate Josephine 
and her ladies, in a dim-lighted apartment, by 
the terrors of a fiction to which his voice and 
dramatic power lent every addition. 

I call Napoleon the agent or attorney of the mid- 
dle class of modern society ; of the throng who fill 
the markets, shops, counting-houses, manufactories, 
ships, of the modern world, aiming to be rich. He 
was the agitator, the destroyer of prescription, the 


QAO REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


internal improver, the liberal, the radical, the in- 
ventor of means, the opener of doors and markets, 
the subverter of monopoly and abuse. Of course 
the rich and aristocratic did not like him. Eng- 
land, the centre of capital, and Rome and Austria, 
centres of tradition and genealogy, opposed him. 
The consternation of the dull and conservative 
classes, the terror of the foolish old men and old 
women of the Roman conclave, who in their de- 
spair took hold of any thing, and would cling to 
red-hot iron, — the vain attempts of statists to 
amuse and deceive him, of the emperor of Austria 
to bribe him; and the instinct of the young, ardent 
and active men every where, which pointed him 
out as the giant of the middle class, make his his- 
tory bright and commanding. He had the virtues 
of the masses of his constituents: he had also their 
vices. Iam sorry that the brilliant picture has its 
reverse. But that is the fatal quality which we 
discover in our pursuit of wealth, that it is treach- 
erous, and is bought by the breaking or weakening 
of the sentiments; and it is inevitable that we 
should find the same fact in the history of this 
champion, who proposed to himself simply a brill- 
lant career, without any stipulation or scruple con- 
cerning the means. 
Bonaparte was singularly destitute of generous 
\//sentiments. The highest-placed individual in the 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 241 


most cultivated age and population of the world, —' 
he has not the merit of common truth and honesty. 
He is unjust to his generals; egotistic and monop- 
olizing; meanly stealing the credit of their great 
actions from Kellermann, from Bernadotte ; in- 
triguing to involve his faithful Junot in hopeless 
bankruptcy, in order to drive him to a distance 
from Paris, because the familiarity of his man- 
ners offends the new pride of his throne. He is a 
boundless liar. The official paper, his “‘ Moniteur,” 
and all his bulletins, are proverbs for saying what 
he wished. to be believed ; and worse, — he sat, in 
his premature old age, in his lonely island, coldly 
falsifying facts and dates and characters, and giv- 
ing to history a theatrical éclaét. Like all French- 
men he has a passion for stage effect. Every ac- 
tion that breathes of generosity is poisoned by this 
calculation. His star, his love of glory, his doc- 
trine of the immortality of the soul, are all French. 
“TI must dazzle and astonish. If I were to give 
the liberty of the press, my power could not last 
three days.” To make a great noise is his favorite 
design. “A great reputation is a great noise: the 
more there is made, the farther off it is heard. 
Laws, institutions, monuments, nations, all fall ; 
but the noise continues, and resounds in after ages.” 
His doctrine of immortality is simply fame. His 


theory of influence is not flattermg. ‘There are 
VOL. Iv. 16 


242, REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


/two levers for moving men, —interest and fear. 
Love is a silly infatuation, depend upon it. Friend- 
ship is but a name. I love nobody. I do not even 
love my brothers: perhaps Joseph a little, from 
habit, and because he is my elder; and Duroc, I 
love him too; but why ?—because his character 
pleases me: he is stern and resolute, and I believe 
the fellow never shed a tear. For my part I know 
very well that I have no true friends. As long as 
I continue to be what I am, I may have as many 
pretended friends as I please. Leave sensibility 
to women; but men should be firm in heart and 
purpose, or they should have nothing to do with 
war and government.” He was thoroughly unscru- 
pulous. He would steal, slander, assassinate, drown 
and poison, as his interest dictated. He had no 
generosity, but mere vulgar hatred; he was in- 
tensely selfish; he was perfidious; he cheated at 
cards ; he was a prodigious gossip, and opened let- 
ters, and delighted in his infamous police, and 
rubbed his hands with joy when he had intercepted 
some morsel of intelligence concerning the men and 
women about him, boasting that “he knew every 
thing ;” and interfered with the cutting the dresses 
of the women ; and listened after the hurrahs and 
the compliments of the street, incognito. His man- 
ners were coarse. He treated women with low 


familiarity. He had the habit of pulling their ears 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 248 


and pinching their cheeks when he was in good 
humor, and of pulling the ears and whiskers of 
men, and of striking and horse-play with them, to 
his last days. It does not appear that he listened 
at key-holes, or at least that he was caught at it. 
In short, when you have penetrated through all the 
circles of power and splendor, you were not deal- 
ing with a gentleman, at last; but with an impostor 
and a rogue; and he fully deserves the epithet of 
Jupiter Scapin, or a sort of Scamp Jupiter. 


In describing the two parties into which modern 
society divides itself, — the democrat and the con- 
servative, — I said, Bonaparte represents the Dem- 
ocrat, or the party of men of business, against the 
stationary or conservative party. I omitted then 
to say, what is material to the statement, namely 
that these two parties differ only as young and old. 
The democrat is a young conservative ; the conser- ) 
vative is an. old democrat. The aristocrat_is ‘the. 
democrat ripe “and gone to to seed ; ; — because both | 
parties stand on the one » ground of the supreme 
value of property, which one endeavors to get, and. 
the other to keep. Bonaparte may be said to rep- 
resent the whole history of this party, its youth and 
its age ; yes, and with poetic justice its fate, in his 
own. The counter-revolution, the counter-party, 
still waits for its organ and representative, in a 


244 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


lover and a man of truly public and universal 
aims. 

Here was an experiment, under the most favora- 
ble conditions, of the powers of intellect without 
conscience. Never was such a leader so endowed 
and so weaponed; never leader found such aids 
and followers. And what was the result of this vast 
talent and power, of these immense armies, burned 
cities, squandered treasures, immolated millions of 
men, of this demoralized Europe? It came to no 
result. All passed away like the smoke of his ar- 
tillery, and left no trace. He left France smaller, 
poorer, feebler, than he found it; and the whole 
contest for freedom was to be begun again. The 
attempt was in principle suicidal. France served 
him with life and limb and estate, as long as it 
could identify its interest with him ; but when men 
saw that after victory was another war; after the 
destruction of armies, new conscriptions ; and they 
who had toiled so desperately were never nearer to 
the reward, — they could not spend what they had 
earned, nor repose on their down-beds, nor strut in 
their chateaux, — they deserted him. Men found 
that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other 
men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a 
succession of shocks on any one who takes hold of 
it, producing spasms which contract the muscles of 
the hand, so that the man can not open his fingers ; 


NAPOLEON; OR, THE MAN OF THE WORLD. 245 


and the animal inflicts new and more violent shocks, ° 
until he paralyzes and kills his victim. So this ex- 

orbitant egotist narrowed, impoverished and ab- 

sorbed the power and existence of those who served 

him ; and the universal cry of France and of Eu-_ , 
rope in 1814 was, “ Enough of him;” “ Assez de V 

Bonaparte.” 

It was not Bonaparte’s fault. He did all that 
in him lay to live and thrive without moral princi- . 
ple. It was the nature of things, the eternal law 
of man and of the world which baulked and ruined 
him; and the result, in a million experiments, will 
be the same. Every experiment, by multitudes or by, 
individuals, that has a sensual and selfish aim, will 
fail. The pacific Fourier will be as inefficient, as 
the pernicious Napoleon. As long as our civiliza- 
tion is essentially one of property, of fences, of ex- 
clusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our 
riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in 
our laughter, and our wine will burn our mouth. 
Only that good profits which we can_taste with _ 
all doors open, and which serves all men. 


coe 


) “Ah - Me 
: ies 0, | 5.4 r ss = eagle 


Ri af toe ard =e 


wid pennant 
Mae bate Po Tt 


— i Vor yap lb eaeetnentiee sph: Sprcoues 


caril Rex ean ie ROE sg a 
© aoletide 3 ne ry + ae er firineg trae 
c ‘ti ak’ at pais 5. an sei ded: 
ARES nfiath Swirl wage ony es 
oat hi an: 
EE gusctth Ht 


sui 


ee 
asthat 


saute alee: my r 
gatfibuee seinatitet 
toate ante ee” 
Shahan, iene mage hie Se Tha: sapiens 
rae Pay, ah 2h: rank fa ih, OR EN me 
sLthve. sie Wd), Oat hohe wont ypc 98 3 wi; nae a a 
ae Tags Hae BA TESS, slot Wi. 5 a A LOSE, rel) Shas ‘ | 
; iy 7 ae 


é 


pa 1 2 des : a 


rh K e 


wi) = 





GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 


ATH HO gE! 


iy 


ra, 





Vil. 
GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 





I FIND a provision in the constitution of the 
world for the writer, or secretary, who is to report 
the doings of the miraculous spirit of life that every- 
where throbs and works. His office is a reception 
of the facts into the mind, and then a selection of 
the eminent and characteristic experiences. 

Nature will bereported. All things are engaged 
in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, 
goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock 
leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river its 
channel in the soil; the animal its bones in the 
stratum ; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in. 
the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in 
the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the’ 
snow or along the ground, but prints, in characters! 
more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every 
act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of 
his fellows and in his own manners and face. The 
air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the 
ground is all memoranda and signatures, and every 


250 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


object covered over with hints which speak to the 
intelligent. 

In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and 
the narrative is the print of the seal. It neither 
exceeds nor comes short of the fact. But nature 
strives upward ; and, in man, the report is some- 
thing more than print of the seal. It is a new and 
finer form of the original. The record is alive, as 
that which it recorded is alive. In man, the mem- 
ory is a kind of looking-glass, which, having received 
the injages of surreunding objects, is touched with 
life, and disposes them in a new order. The facts 
do not lie in it inert; but some subside and others 
shine; so that soon we have a new picture, com- 
posed of the eminent experiences. The man co- 
operates. He loves to communicate; and that 
which is for him to say lies as a load on his heart 
until it is delivered. But, besides the universal 
joy of conversation, some men are born with exalted 
powers for this second creation. Men are born to 
write. The gardener saves every slip and seed and 
peach-stone: his vocation is to be a planter of 
plants. Not less does the writer attend his affair. 
Whatever he beholds or experiences, comes to him 
as a model and sits for its picture. He counts 
it all nonsense that they say, that some things are 
undescribable. He believes that all that can be 
thought can be written, first or last ; and he would 


i 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 951 


report the Holy Ghost, or attempt it. Nothing 
so broad, so subtle, or so dear, but comes therefore 
commended to his pen, and he will write. In his 
eyes, a man is the faculty of reporting, and the 
universe is the possibility of being reported. In 
conversation, in calamity, he finds new materials ; 
as our German poet said, “Some god gave me the 
power to paint what I suffer.” He draws his rents 
from rage and pain. By acting rashly, he buys the 
power of talking wisely. Vexations and a tempest 
of passion only fill his sail; as the good Luther 
writes,/“* When I am angry, I can pray well and | 
preach well pa and, if we knew the genesis of fine 
strokes of eloquence, they might recall the complai- 
sance of Sultan Amurath, who struck off some 
Persian heads, that his physician, Vesalius, might 
see the spasms in the muscles of the neck. His 
failures are the preparation of his victories. A 
new thought or a crisis of passion apprises him 
that all that he has yet learned and written is ex- 
oteric, —is not the fact, but some rumor of the 
fact. What then? Does he throw away the pen? 
No; he begins again to describe in the new light 
which has shined on him,— if, by some means, he 
may yet save some true word. Nature conspires. 
rises for utterance, though to rude and stammering 
organs. If they cannot compass it, it waits and 


952 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


works, until at last it moulds them to its perfect 
will and is articulated. 

This striving after imitative expression, which 
one meets every, where, is significant of the aim of 
nature, but is mere stenography. ‘There are higher 
degrees, and nature has more splendid endowments 
for those whom she elects to a superior office ; for 
»the class of scholars or writers, who see connection 
where the multitude tude see fragments, and who are 
‘impelled to exhibit the facts in order, and so to 
supply the axis on which the frame of things turns. 
Nature has dearly at heart the formation of the 
speculative man, or scholar. It is an end never lost 
sight of, and is prepared in the original casting of 
things. He is no permissive or accidental appear- 
ance, but an organic agent, one of the estates of 
the realm, provided and prepared from of old and 
from everlasting, in the knitting and contexture 
of things. Presentiments, impulses, cheer him. 
There is a certain heat in the breast which attends 
the perception of a primary truth, which is the 
shining of the spiritual sun down into the shaft of 
the mine. Every thought which dawns on the 
mind, in the moment of its emergence announces 
its own rank,— whether it is some whimsy, or 
whether it is a power. 

If he have his incitements, there is, on the other 
side, invitation and need enough of his gift. Soci 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 953 


etyh has,-at-all times, the same want, 1 namely. of one 


“sane. man. smasiteA h adequate powers of _expression_ to. 


hold up each object of f monomanta in in its right rela-_ 
tions. — ~The ambitious and ‘mercenary bring their 
last new mumbo-jumbo, whether tariff, Texas, rail- 
road, Romanism, mesmerism, or California; and, by 
detaching the object from its relations, easily suc- 
ceed in making it seen in a glare; and a multitude 
go mad about it, and they are not to be reproved 
or cured by the opposite multitude who are kept 
from this particular insanity by an equal frenzy on 
another crotchet. But let one man have the com- 
prehensive eye that can replace this isolated prodigy 
in its right neighborhood-and—bearings, —the illu- 
sion vanishes, and the returning reason of the com- 
munity thanks the reason of the monitor. 

The scholar is the man of the ages, but he must 
also wish with other men to stand well with his con- 
temporaries. But there is a certain ridicule, among 
superficial people, thrown on the scholars or clerisy, 
which is of no import unless the scholar heed it. 
In this country, the emphasis of conversation and 
of public opinion commends the practical man ; 
and the solid portion of the community is named 
with significant respect in every circle. Our peo- 
ple are of Bonaparte’s opinion concerning ideolo- 
gists. Ideas are subversive of social order and 
eomfort, and at last make a fool of the possessor. 


254 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


It is believed, the ordering a cargo of goods from 
New York to Smyrna, or the running up and 
down to procure a company of subscribers to set 
a-going five or ten thousand spindles, or the ne- 
gotiations of a caucus and the practising on the 
prejudices and facility of country-people to secure 
their votes in November, —is practical and com- 
mendable. 

If I were to compare action of a much higher 
strain with a life of contemplation, I should not 
venture to pronounce with much confidence in fa- 
vor of the former. Mankind have such a deep 
stake in inward illumination, that there is much to 
be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his 
life of thought and prayer. A certain partiality, 
a headiness and loss of balance, is the tax which 
all action must pay. Act, if you like, — but you 
do it at_your-peril. Men’s actions are too strong 
for them. Show me aman who has acted and who 
has not been the victim and slave of his action. 
What they have done commits and enforces them to 
)do the same again. The first act, which was to be 
an experiment, becomes a sacrament. The fiery re- 
former embodies his aspiration in some rite or cov- 
enant, and he and his friends cleave to the form and 
lose the aspiration. The Quaker has established 
Quakerism, the Shaker has established his monas- 
tery and his dance; and although each prates of 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 200 


spirit, there is no spirit, but repetition, which is 
anti-spiritual. But where are his new things of to- 
day? In actions of enthusiasm this drawback ap- 
pears, but in those lower activities, which have no 
higher aim than to make us more comfortable and 
more cowardly ; in actions of cunning, actions that 
steal and lie, actions that divorce the speculative 
from the practical faculty and put a ban on reason 
and sentiment, there is nothing else but drawback 
and negation. The Hindoos write in their sacred 
books, ‘* Children only, and not the learned, speak 
of the speculative and the practical faculties as two. 
They are but one, for both obtain the selfsame 
end, and the place which is gained by the followers 
of the one is gained by the followers of the other. 
That man seeta, who seeth that the speculative and 
the practical doctrines are one.” For great action 
must draw on the spiritual nature. The measure 
of action is the sentiment from which it proceeds. 
The greatest action may easily be one of the most 
private circumstance. 

This disparagement will not come from the lead- 
ers, but from inferior persons. The robust gentle- 
men who stand at the head of the practical class, 
share the ideas of the time, and have too much 
sympathy with the speculative class. It is not 
from men excellent in any kind that disparage- 
ment of any other is to be looked for. With such, 


256 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


Talleyrand’s question is ever the main one; not, is 
he rich? is he committed ? is he well-meaning? has 
he this or that faculty? is he of the movement? is 
he of the establishment ?— but, Js he-any body ? 
does he stand. for-something? He must be good 
of his kind. That is all that Talleyrand, all that 
State-street, all that the common-sense of mankind 
asks. Be real and admirable, not as we know, but 
as you know. Able men do not care in what kind 
a man is able, so only that he is able. A master 
likes a master, and does not stipulate whether it be 
orator, artist, craftsman, or king. 
'§ Societyhas really no graver interest than the 
“well-being of the literary class. And it is not to 
‘be denied that men are cordial in their recognition 
and welcome of intellectual accomplishments. Still 
the writer does not stand with us on any command- 
ing ground. I think this to be his own fault. A 
pound passes for a pound. ‘There have been times 
when he was a sacred person: he wrote Bibles, 
the first hymns, the codes, the epics, tragic songs, 
Sibylline verses, Chaldean oracles, Laconian sen- 
tences, inscribed on temple walls. Every word was 
true, and woke the nations to new life. He wrote 
without levity and without choice. Every word 
was carved before his eyes into the earth and the 
sky ; and the sun and stars were only letters of the 
same purport and of no more necessity. But how 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. rai 


ean he be honored when he does not honor himself ; 
when he loses himself in the crowd; when he is no 
longer the lawgiver, but the sycophant, ducking to 
the giddy opinion of a reckless public; when he 
must sustain with shameless advocacy some bad 
government, or must bark, all the year round, in 
opposition ; or write conventional criticism, or prof- 
ligate novels; or at any rate write without thought, 
and without recurrence by day and by night to the 
sources of inspiration ? 

Some reply to these questions may be furnished 
by looking over the list of men of literary gen- 
ius in our age. Among these no more instructive 
name occurs than that of Goethe to represent the 
powers and duties of the scholar or writer. 

I described Bonaparte as a representative of the 
popular external life and aims of the nineteenth 
century. Its other half, its poet, is Goethe, a man 
quite domesticated in the century, breathing its air, 
enjoying its fruits, impossible at any earlier time, 
and taking away, by his colossal parts, the reproach 
of weakness which but for him would lie on the 
intellectual works of the period. He appears at a 
time when a general culture has spread itself and 
has smoothed down all sharp individual traits; 
when, in the absence of heroic characters, a social 
eomfort and co-operation have come in. There is 


no poet, but scores of poetic writers; no Colum- 
VOL, IV 17 


~, 


258 REPRESENTATIVE. MEN. 


bus, but hundreds of post-captains, with transit- 
telescope, barometer and concentrated soup and 
pemmican ; no Demosthenes, no Chatham, but any 
number of clever parliamentary and forensic de- 
baters ; no prophet or saint, but colleges of divin- 
ity ; no learned man, but learned societies, a cheap 
press, reading-rooms and book-clubs without num- 
ber. There was never such a miscellany of facts. 
The world extends itself like American trade. We 
conceive Greek or Roman life, life in the Middle 
Ages, to be a simple and comprehensible affair; but 
modern life to respect a multitude of things, which 
is distracting. 

Goethe was the philosopher of this multiplicity ; 


/hundred-handed, Argus-eyed, able and happy to 
‘cope with this rolling miscellany of facts and sci- 
ences, and by his own versatility to dispose of them 


with ease; a manly mind, unembarrassed by the 
variety of coats of convention with which life had 
got encrusted, easily able by his subtlety to pierce 
these and to draw his strength from nature, with 
which he lived in full communion. What is 
strange too, he lived in a small town, in a petty 
state, in a defeated state, and in a time when Ger- 


/ many played no such leading part in the world’s 


affairs as to swell the bosom of her sons with any 
metropolitan pride, such as might have cheered a 
French, or English, or once, a Roman or Attic 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 259 


genius. Yet there is no trace of provincial limita- 
tion in his muse. He is not’a debtor to his position, 
but was born with a free and controlling genius. 

The Helena, or the second part of Faust, is a \ 
philosophy of literature ; set in poetry ; the work of © 
one who found himself the master of histories, my- 
thologies, philosophies, sciences and national litera- 
tures, in the encyclopedical manner in which mod- 
ern erudition, with its international intercourse of 
the whole earth’s population, researches into In- 
dian, Etruscan and all Cyclopean arts; geology, 
chemistry, astronomy ; and every one of these king- 
doms assuming a certain aerial and poetic charac- 
ter, by reason of the multitude. One looks at a 
king with reverence ; but if one should chance to 
be at a congress of kings, the eye would take liber-| 
ties with the peculiarities of each. These are not 
wild miraculous songs, but elaborate forms to which 
the poet has confided the results of eighty years of 
observation. This reflective and critical wisdom 
makes the poem more truly the flower of this time. 
It dates itself. Still he is a poet, — poet of a 
prouder laurel than any contemporary, and, under 
this plague of microscopes (for he seems to see out 
of every pore of his skin), strikes the harp with a 
hero’s strength and grace. 

The wonder of the book is its superior intelli- 
gence. In tke menstruum of this man’s wit, the - 


260 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


past and the present ages, and. their religions, pol: 
itics and modes of thinking, are dissolved into 
archetypes and ideas. What new mythologies sail 
through his head! The Greeks said that Alexan- 
der went as far as Chaos; Goethe went, only the 
other day, as far ; and one step farther he hazarded, 
and brought himself safe back. 

There is a heart-cheering freedom in his specula- 
tion. The immense horizon which journeys with 
us lends its majesty to trifles and to matters of 
convenience and necessity, as to solemn and festal 
performances. He was the soul of his century. If 
that was learned, and had become, by population, 
compact organization and drill of parts, one great 
Exploring Expedition, accumulating a glut of facts 
and fruits too fast for any hitherto-existing savans 
to classify, — this man’s mind had ample chambers 
for the distribution of all. He had a power te 
unite the detached atoms again by their own law. 
He has clothed our modern existence with poetry. 
Amid littleness and detail, he detected the Genius 
of life, the old cunning Proteus, nestling close 
beside us, and showed that the dulness and prose 
we ascribe to the age was only another of his 
masks : — 


“His very flight is presence in disguise :” 


— that he had put off a gay uniform for a fatigue 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 261 


dress, and was not a whit less vivacious or rich in 
Liverpool or the Hague than once in Rome or An- 
tioch. He sought him in public squares and main 
streets, in boulevards and hotels; and, in the solid- 
est kingdom of routine and the senses, he showed 
the lurking dzmonic power ; that, in actions of 
routine, a thread of mythology and fable spins it- 
self: and this, by tracing the pedigree of every 
usage and practice, every institution, utensil and 
means, home to its origin in the structure of man. 
He had an extreme impatience of conjecture and 
of rhetoric. “I have guesses enough of my own; 
if a man write a book, let him set down only what 
he knows.” He writes in the plainest and lowest 
tone, omitting a great.deal-more than he writes, 
and putting ever a thing for a word. He has ex- 
plained the distinction between the antique and 
the modern spirit and art. He has defined art, its 
scope and laws. He has said the best things about 
nature that ever were. said. He treats nature as 
the old philosophers, as the seven wise masters did, 
—and, with whatever loss of French tabulation 
and dissection, poetry and humanity remain to us; 
and they have some doctoral skill. Eyes are bet- 
ter on the whole than telescopes or microscopes. 
He has contributed a key to many parts of nature, 
through the rare turn for unity and simplicity in 


hismind. Thus Goethe suggested the leading idea 


262 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


of modern botany, that a leaf or the eye of a leaf 
is the unit of botany, and that every part of the 
plant is only a transformed leaf to meet a new con- 
dition ; and, by varying the conditions, a leaf may 
be converted into any other organ, and any other 
organ into a leaf. In like manner, in osteology, he 
assumed that one vertebra of the spine might be 
considered as the unit of the skeleton: the head 
was only the uppermost vertebrze transformed. 
“The plant goes from knot to knot, closing at last 
with the flower and the seed. So the tape-worm, 
the caterpillar, goes from knot to knot and closes 
with the head. Man and the higher animals are 
built up through the vertebrae, the powers being 
concentrated in the head.” In optics again he re- 
jected the artificial theory of seven colors, and con- 
‘sidered that every color was the mixture of light 
and darkness in new proportions. It is really of 
very little consequence what topic he writes upon. 
He sees at every pore, and has a certain gravita- 
‘tion towards truth. He will realize what you say. 
He hates to be.trifled.with and to be made to say 
‘over again some old wife’s fable that has had pos- 
session of men’s faith these thousand years. He 
may as well see if it is true as another. He sifts 
it. Iam here, he would say, to be the measure and 
judge of these things. Why should I take them 
on trust? And therefore what he says of religion, 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 263 


of passion, of marriage, of manners, of property, 
of paper-money, of periods of belief, of omens, of 
luck, or whatever else, refuses to be forgotten. 
Take the most remarkable “example that could 
occur of this tendency to verify every term in pop- 
ular use. The Devil had played an important part 
in mythology in “all times. Goethe would have nc 
word that does not cover a thing. The same meas- 
ure will still serve: fe I have never heard of any , 
crime which I might not have committed.”] So he 
flies at the throat of this imp. He shall 1 real ; 
he shall be modern; he shall be European; he shall, 
dress like a gentleman, and accept the manners, | 
and walk in the streets, and be well initiated in the | 
life of Vienna and of Heidelberg in 1820, — or he 
shall not exist. Accordingly, he stripped him of } 
mythologic gear, of horns, cloven foot, harpoon 
tail, brimstone and blue-fire, and instead of looking. 
in books and pictures, looked for him in his own ( 
mind, in every shade of coldness, selfishness and. 
unbelief that, in crowds or in solitude, darkens over ' 
the human thought, — and found that the portrait. 
gained reality and terror by every thing he added | 
and by every thing he took away. He found that 
the essence of this hobgoblin which had hovered 
in shadow about the habitations of men ever since 
there were men, was pure intellect, applied,— as 
always there is a tendency,—to the service of 


264 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


the senses: and he flung into literature, in his Me- 
phistopheles, the first. organic. figure that has been 
added for some ages, and which will remain as long 
as the Prometheus. i 

I have no design to enter into any analysis of 
his numerous works. ‘They consist of translations, 
criticism, dramas, lyric and every other description 
of poems, literary journals and portraits of distin- 
guished men. Yet I cannot omit to specify the 
“Wilhelm Meister.” 

“ Wilhelm Meister” is a novel in every sense, 
the first of its ‘kind, called by its admirers the > only 
delineation ute modern. society, —as if other noy- 
els, those of Scott for example, dealt with costume 
and condition, this with the spirit of life. It isa 
book over which some veil is still drawn. It is 
read by very intelligent persons with wonder and 
delight. It is preferred by some such to Hamlet, 
as a work of genius. I suppose no book of this 
century can compare with it in its delicious sweet- 
ness, So new, so provoking to the mind, gratifying 
it with so many and so solid thoughts, just in- 
sights into life and manners and characters; so 
many good hints for the conduct_of life, so many 
unexpected glimpses into a higher sphere, and 
never a trace of rhetoric or dulness. A very 
provoking book to the curiosity of young men of 
genius, but a very unsatisfactory one. Lovers of 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 265 


light reading, those who look in it for the enter 
tainment they find in a romance, are disappointed. 
On ‘the other hand, those who begin it with the 
higher hope to read in it a worthy history of 
genius, and the just award of the laurel to its 
toils and denials, have also reason to complain. 
We had an English romance here, not long ago, 
professing to embody the hope of a new age and 
to unfold the political hope of the party called 
‘Young England, — in which the only reward 
of virtue is a seat in Parliament and a peerage. 
Goethe’s romance has_a conclusion as lame and 
immoral. George Sand, in Consuelo and its con- 
tinuation, has sketched a truer and more dignified 
picture. In the progress of the story, the char- 
acters of the hero and heroine expand at a rate 
that shivers the porcelain chess-table of aristocratic 
convention: they quit the society and habits of 
their rank, they lose their wealth, they become 
the servants of great ideas and of the most gen- 
erous social ends; until at last the hero, who is 
the centre and fountain of an association for the 
rendering of the noblest benefits to the human 
race, no longer answers to his own titled name ; 
it sounds foreign and remote in his ear. “I am 
only man,” he says; “I breathe and work for 
man ;” and this in poverty and extreme sacrifices. 
Goethe’s hero, on the contrary, has so many weak- 


266 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


nesses and impurities and keeps such bad com- 
pany, that the sober English public, when the 
book was translated, were disgusted. And yet it 
is so crammed with wisdom, with knowledge of 
the world and with knowledge of laws; the per- 
sons so truly and subtly drawn, and with such few 
strokes, and not a word too much,—the book re- 
mains ever so new and unexhausted, that we must 
even let it go its way and be willing to get what 
good from it we can, assured that it has only 
begun its office and has millions of readers yet to 
serve. 

The argument is the passage of a democrat to 
the aristocracy, using both words in their best 
sense. And this passage is not made in any mean 
or creeping way, but through the hall door. Na- 
ture and character assist, and the rank is made 
real by sense and probity in the nobles. No gen- 
erous youth can escape this charm of reality in 
the book, so that it is highly stimulating to intel- 
lect and courage. 

The ardent and holy Novalis characterized the 
book as “ thoroughly modern and prosaic; the ro- 
mantic is completely levelled in it; so is the po- 
etry of nature; the wonderful. The book treats 
only of the ordinary affairs of men: it is a poet. 
icized civic and domestic story. The wonderful 
in it is expressly treated as fiction and enthusi- 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 267 


astic dreaming :”” —and yet, what is also charac- 
teristic, Novalis soon returned to this book, and 
it remained his favorite reading to the end ot his 
life. 

What distinguishes Goethe for French and 
English readers is a property which he shares 


with his nation, — a, habitual reference to. interior wr \ 


truth, In England and in America there is a 
respect for talent; and, if it is exerted in support 
of any ascertained or intelligible interest or party, 
or in regular opposition to any, the public is satis- 
fied. In France there is even a greater delight 
in intellectual brilliancy for its own sake. And 
in all these countries, men of talent write from 
talent. It is enough if the understanding is oc- 
cupied, the taste propitiated,—so many columns, 
so many hours, filled in a lively and creditable 
way. The German intellect wants the French 
sprightliness, the fine practical understanding of 
the English, and the American adventure; but it 
has a certain probity, which never rests in a su- 
perficial performance, but asks steadily, Zo what 
end? A German public asks for a controlling 
sincerity. Here is activity of thought; but what 
is it for? What does the man mean? Whence, 
whence all these thoughts ? 
Talent alone can not make a writer. There, | 

must be a man behind the book; a personality L V 


' 968 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


)which by birth and quality is pledged to the doc. 
)trines there set forth, and which exists to see and 
state things so, and not otherwise; holding things 
because they are things. If he cannot rightly 
express himself to-day, the same things subsist 
and will open themselves to-morrow. There lies 
the burden on his mind,—the burden of truth 
to be declared,— more or less understood; and it 
constitutes his business and calling in the world 
\to see those facts through, and to make them 
known. What signifies that he trips and stam- 
mers; that his voice is harsh or hissing; that 
his method or his tropes are inadequate? That 
message will find method and imagery, articulation 
and melody. Though he were dumb it would 
speak. If not,—if there be no such God’s word 
' in the man, — what care we how adroit, how fluent, 
| how brilliant he is? 

It makes a great difference to the force of any 
sentence whether there be a man behind it or no. 
In the learned journal, in the influential news- 
paper, I discern no form; only some irresponsi- 
ble shadow ; oftener some moneyed corporation, or 
some dangler who hopes, in the mask and robes of 
his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through 
every clause and part of speech of a right book I 
meet the eyes of the most determined of men; his 
force and terror inundate every word; the commas 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 269 


and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic 
and nimble, — can go far and live long. 

In England and America, one may be an adept 
in the writings of a Greek or Latin poet, without 
any poetic taste or fire. That a man has spent 
years on Plato and Proclus, does not afford a pre- 
sumption that he holds heroic opinions, or under- 
values the fashions of his town. But the German 
nation have the most ridiculous good faith on these 
subjects: the student, out of the lecture-room, still 
broods on the lessons; and the professor can not 
divest himself of the fancy that the truths of phi- 
losophy have some application to Berlin and Mu- 
nich. This earnestness..enables them to outsee 
men of much more talent. Hence almost all the 
valuable distinctions which are current in higher 
conversation have been derived to us from Ger- 
many. But whilst men distinguished for wit and 
learning, in Hngland and France, adopt their study 
and their side with a certain levity, and are not 
understood to be very deeply engaged, from 
grounds of character, to the topic or the part they 
espouse, — Goethe, the head and body of the Ger- 
man nation, does not speak from talent, but the 
truth shines through: he is very wise, though his 
talent often veils his wisdom. However excellent 
his sentence is, he has somewhat better in view. 
It awakens my curiosity. He has the formidable 


270 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


independence which converse with truth gives: 
hear you, or forbear, his fact abides; and your in- 
terest in the writer is not confined to his story and 
he dismissed from memory when he has performed 
his task ereditably, as a baker when he has left his 
loaf; but his work is the least part of him. |The 
old Eternal Genius who built the world has con- 
fided himself more to this man than to any other._ 

I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the high- 
est grounds from which genius has spoken. He 
has not worshipped the highest unity; he is inca- 
pable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment. 
There are nobler strains in poetry than any he has 
sounded. There are writers poorer in talent, whose 
tone is purer and more touches the heart. Goethe 
can never be dear to men. His is not even the 
devotion to pure truth ; but to truth for the sake of 
culture. He has no aims less large than the con- 
quest of universal nature, of universal truth, to be 
his portion: a man not to be bribed, nor deceived, 
nor overawed; of astoical self-command and self- 
denial, and having one test for all men, — What 
can you teach me? All possessions are valued by 
him for that only; rank, privileges, health, time, 
Being itself. 

He is the type of culture, the amateur of all arts 
and sciences and events; artistic, but not artist; 
spiritual, but not spiritualist. There is nothing he 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 971 


had not right to know: there is no weapon in the 
armory of universal genius he did not take into 
his hand, but with peremptory heed that he should 
not be for a moment prejudiced by his instruments. 
He lays a ray of light under every fact, and _be- 
tween himself and his dearest property. From 
him nothing was hid, nothing withholden. The 
lurking demons sat to him, and the saint who saw 
the demons; and the metaphysical elements took 
form. “ Piety itself is no aim, but only a means 
whereby through purest inward peace we may at- 
tain to highest culture.” And his penetration of 
every secret of the fine arts will make Goethe still 
more statuesque. His affections help him, like wo- 
men employed by Cicero to worm out the secret of 
conspirators. Enmities he has none. Enemy of 
him you may be, —if so you shall teach him aught 
which your good-will cannot, were it only what ex- 
perience will accrue from your ruin. Enemy and 
welcome, but enemy on high terms. He cannot 
hate any body; his time is worth too much. Tem- 
peramental antagonisms may be suffered, but like 
feuds of emperors, who fight dignifiedly across 
kingdoms. 

His autobiography, under the title of ‘ Poetry 
and Truth out of my Life,” is the expression of 
_ the idea, — now familiar to the world through: the 
German mind, but a novelty to England, Old and 


7H 4 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


New, when that book appeared, — that a man ex- 
ists for culture; not for what he can accomplish, 
but for what can be accomplished in him. The 
reaction of things on the man is the only note- 
worthy result. (An intellectual man can see him- 
self as a third person ; therefore his faults and de- 
lusions interest him equally with his successes.| 
Though he wishes to prosper in affairs, he wishes 
more to know the history and destiny of man ; 
whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him 
are only interested in a low success. 

. This idea reigns in the “ Dichtung und Wahr- 
heit”’ and directs the selection of the incidents ; 
and nowise the external importance of events, the 
rank of the personages, or the bulk of incomes. Of 
course the book affords slender materials for what 
would be reckoned with us a ** Life of Goethe ;”” — 
few dates, no correspondence, no details of offices 
or employments, no light on his marriage; and a 
period of ten years, that should be the most.active 
in his life, after his settlement at Weimar, is sunk 
in silence. Meantime certain love-affairs that came 
to nothing, as people say, have the strangest impor- 
tance: he crowds us with details : — certain whim- 
sical opinions, cosmogonies and religions of his own 
invention, and especially his relations to remarka- 
ble minds and to critical epochs of thought: — 
these he magnifies. His “ Daily and Yearly Jour. 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 273 


” 


nal,” his “Italian Travels,’ his “Campaign in 
France” and the historical part of his “ Theory of 
Colors,” have the same interest. In the last, he 
rapidly notices Kepler, Roger Bacon, Galileo, New- 
ton, Voltaire, &c.; and the charm of this portion of 
the book consists in the simplest statement of the 
relation betwixt these grandees of European scien- 
tific history and himself; the mere drawing of the 
lines from Goethe to Kepler, from Goethe to Ba- 
con, from Goethe to Newton. The drawing of the 
line is, for the time and person, a solution of the 
formidable problem, and gives pleasure when Iph- 
igenia and Faust do not, without any cost of inven- 
tion comparable to that of Iphigenia and Faust. 
This lawgiver of art is not an artist. Was it 
that he knew too much, that his sight was micro- 
scopic and interfered with the just perspective, the 
seeing of the whole? He is fragmentary; a writer 
of occasional poems and of an encyclopedia of sen- 
tences. When he sits down to write a drama or a’ 
tale, he collects and sorts his observations from a 
hundred sides, and combines them into the body as 
fitly as he can. A great deal refuses to incorpo- 
rate: this he adds loosely as letters of the parties, 
leaves from their journals, or the like. A great 
deal still is left that will not find any place. This 
the bookbinder alone can give any cohesion to; and 


hence, notwithstanding the looseness of many of his 
VOL. Iv. 18 


214 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


works, we have volumes of detached paragraphs, 
aphorisms, Xenien, &e. 

I suppose the worldly tone of his tales grew out 
of the calculations of self-culture. It was the in- 
firmity of an admirable scholar, who loved the 
world out of gratitude ; who knew where libraries, 
galleries, architecture, laboratories, savans and lei- 
sure, were to be had, and who did not quite trust 
the compensations of poverty and nakedness. Soc- 
rates loved Athens; Montaigne, Paris; and Ma- 
dame de Staél said she was only vulnerable on that 
side (namely, of Paris). It has its favorable as- 
pect. All the geniuses are usually so ill-assorted 
and sickly that one is ever wishing them somewhere 
else. We seldom see any body who is not uneasy 
or afraid to live. There is a slight blush of shame 
on the cheek of good men and aspiring men, and a 
spice of caricature. But this man was entirely at 
home and happy in his century and the world. 
None was so fit to live, or more heartily enjoyed 
the game. In this aim of culture, which is the 
genius of his works, is their power. The idea of 
absolute, eternal truth, without reference to my 
own enlargement by it, is higher. The surrender 
to the torrent of poetic inspiration is higher; but 
compared with any motives on which books are 
written in England and America, this is very truth, 
and has the power to inspire which belongs to truth. 


GOETHE; OR, THE WRITER. 15 


Thus has he brought back to a book some of its 
ancient might and dignity. 

Goethe, coming into an over-civilized time and 
country, when original talent was oppressed under 
the load of books and mechanical auxiliaries and 
the distracting variety of claims, taught men how 
to dispose of this mountainous miscellany and make 
it subservient. I join Napoleon with him, as being 
both representatives of the impatience and reaction 
of nature against the morgue of conventions, — two 
stern realists, who, with their scholars, have sever- 
ally set the axe at the root of the tree of cant and 
seeming, for this time and for ali time. This cheer- 
ful laborer, with no external popularity or provoca- 
tion, drawing his motive and his plan from his own 
breast, tasked himself with ‘stints for a giant, and 
without relaxation or rest, except by alternating 
his pursuits, worked on for eighty years as the 
steadiness of his first zeal. 

It is the last lesson of modern science that the 
highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by 
few elements, but by the highest complexity. Man 
is the most composite of all creatures; the wheel- 
insect, volvow globator, 1s at the other extreme. 
We shall learn to draw rents and revenues from 
the immense patrimony of the old and the recent 
ages. (Goethe teaches courage, and the equivalence 
of all times; that the disadvantages of any epoch 


276 REPRESENTATIVE MEN. 


exist only to the faint-hearted. Genius hovers 
with his sunshine and music close by the darkest 
and deafest eras. No mortgage, no attainder, will 
hold on men or hours. The world is young: the 
former great men call to us affectionately. We 
too must write Bibles, to unite again the heavens 
and the earthly world. The secret of genius is to 
suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that 
we know; in the high refinement of modern life, 
in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good 
faith, reality and a purpose; and first, last, midst 
and without end, to honor every truth by use. 


NATURE, 
ADDRESSES AND LECTURES. 





CONTENTS. 


—_—e— 


NATURE F é £ 3 3 : : “ ; 


Tue AMERICAN ScHoutarR. An Oration delivered before 
the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, Aug. 31, 1837 


An Avpress delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity 
College, Cambridge, July 15,1838 . ; : ‘ 


LitERARY Eruics. An Oration delivered before the Liter- 
ary Societies of Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838 


Tue MeruHop or Nature. An Oration delivered before 
the Society of the Adelphi, in Waterville College, Maine, 
August 11, 1841 


Man THE Rerormer. A Lecture read before the Mechan- 
ics’ Apprentices’ Library Association, Boston, January 25, 
1841 


LECTURE ON THE Times. Read at the Masonic Temple, 
Boston, December 2, 1841 : ‘ 5 


THE ConseRVATIVE. A Lecture read in the Masonic Tem- 


ple, Boston, December 9, 1841 . ‘ : : 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. A Lecture read in the Masonic 


Temple, Boston, January, 1842 


THe Younc AMERICAN. A Lecture read before the Mer- 
cantile Library Association, in Boston, February 7, 1844. 


81 


117 


149 + 


181 


215 


245 


277 


309 


34] 


Sr aa 


penn hohe 


rece 
Otay ase 
atin) 39 snob reyes *f ai a whet oes 


=* . 


ie nae ant j a bir its h Sait fies A en le 
Bah PLAY int eghhen uattens 7 
| ; mer, L* 


aA. ‘adn ranaaul 


+ Lew e et 


fy fren Hf ‘0 
(Gok eich 
4 F 4 
tt rh: ’ | Me Ng 
Shah wt LageBA, Yi pha tir se vel 


rs 


Ort ap mp ee ex 
ih 


; ; ey le rt 
YY atacand ods fa vet Ase TT Lay 4. RATE vod 
gE PALE et aie ia apne 
Lb sk ert appienct AK ‘avved ramen) ts. 


Vt pte ae 
an et ¢ Soccernet he sei a iat ee pes 


‘ > en | - ~ 


Pat 


ft att in bw me urine Ee? 3 Atte 1 ore stv 4 at he ¢ 
~ rt 
Ps 


as, crt ‘ve aaye ve sade wale a 


| Leeda SY > am 





NATURE. 


—¢— 


A sUBTLE chain of countless rings 

The next unto the farthest brings ; 

The eye reads omens where it goes, 
And speaks all languages the rose ; 
And, striving to be man, the worm 
Mounts through all the spires of form. 





INTRODUCTION. 





Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepul- 
chres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histo- 
ries, and criticism. The foregoing generations 
beheld God and nature face to face ; we, through 
their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an 
original relation to the universe? Why should 
not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight 
and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation 
to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed 
for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream 
around and through us, and invite us by the pow- 
ers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, 
why should we grope among the dry bones of the 
past, or put the living generation into masquerade 
out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day 
also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. 
There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. 
Let us demand our own works and laws and wor- 
ship. 

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which 
are unanswerable. We must truss the perfection 


10 INTRODUCTION. 


of the creation so far as to believe that whatever 
curiosity the order of things has awakened in our 
minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every 
man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to 
those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, 
before he apprehends it as truth. In like manner, 
nature is already, in its forms and tendencies, de- 
scribing its own design. Let us interrogate the 
great apparition that shines so peacefully around 
us. Let us inquire, to what end is nature? 

All science has one aim, namely, to find a theory 
of nature. We have theories of races and of func- 
tions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to an idea 
of creation. We are now so far from the road to 
truth; that religious teachers dispute and hate each 
other, and speculative men are esteemed unsound 
and frivolous. But to a sound judgment, the most 
abstract truth is the most practical. Whenever a 
true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. 
Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena. Now 
many are thought not only unexplained but inex- 
plicable; as language, sleep, madness, dreams, beasts, 
sex. 

Philosophically considered, the universe is com- 
posed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, 
therefore, all that is separate from us, all which 
Philosophy distinguishes: as the NOT ME, that is, 
both nature and art, all other men and my own 


INTRODUCTION. 11 


body, must be ranked under this name, Naturg. 
In enumerating the values of nature and casting up 
their sum, I shall use the word in both senses ; — 
in its common and in its philosophical import. In 
inquiries so general as our present one, the inaccu- 
racy is not material; no confusion of thought will — 
occur. Vature, in the common sense, refers to es-> | 
sences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river,(. 
the leaf. Art is applied to the mixture of his will) 
with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue,¢ 
a picture. But his operations taken together are 
so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, 
and washing, that in an impression so grand as that 
of the world on the human.mind, they do not vary 
the result. 


‘ 
, 
F 
ny ‘ 
wm 
> 
i 
‘ 
* 
j Cy 
au 
. . 
* » 
| 
bys 
he 
te 
a 
1% 
r . 
* ” - 
“ 
4, 
* 
aa 








‘ 
pf 
i 
1 
} 
= 
i i 
si 
<t 









Siaaaiieh —s pies ta 
; Sasa an ae oo ‘i 
an i alan yen 


bhi. @ Ft 
liebe ea a ties ia Pre “ae ve 


Pe sc Re AS teerenhea 
ret Fy a litt Ag ib: ‘aleled: ae . 
ae pee wens ae ao ae 


wu sents A, i oY hee vat pag ; 


BAMA 





NATURE. 





CHAPTER I. 


To. go into solitude, a man needs to retire as 
much from his chamber as from society. I am not 
solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is 
with me. But if a man would be alone, let him 
look at the stars. The rays that come from those 
heavenly worlds will separate between him and what 
he touches. One might think the atmosphere was 
made transparent with this design, to give man, 
in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of 
the sublime. Seen in the streets of cities, how great 
they are! If the stars should appear one night in 
a thousand years, how would men believe and adore ; 
and preserve for many generations the remembrance 
of the city of God which had been shown! But 
every night come out these envoys of beauty, and 
light the universe with their admonishing smile. 

The stars awaken a certain reverence, because 
though always present, they are inaccessible; but 
all natural objects make a kindred impression, when 
the mind is open to their influence. Nature never 


14 NATURE. 


wears a mean appearance. Neither does the wis- 
est man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by 
finding out all her perfection. Nature never be- 
came a toy toa wise spirit. The flowers, the ani- 
mals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his-best _ 
hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity 
of his childhood. 

When we speak of nature in this manner, we have 
a distinct but most poetical sense in-the mind. We 
mean the integrity of impression made by manifold 
natural objects. It is this which distinguishes the 
stick of timber of the wood-cutter, from the tree of 
the poet. The charming landscape which I saw 
this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty 
or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that,. 
and Manning the woodland beyond. But none of 
‘them owns the landscape. There is a property in 
the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can 
/integrate all the parts, that is, the poet. This is 
the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their 
warranty-deeds give no title. 

To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. . 
Most persons do not see the sun. At least they 
have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates 
only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and 
the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he 
whose inward and outward senses are still truly ad- 
justed to each other ; who has retained the spirit 


NATURE. 15 


of infancy even into the era of manhood. His in- 
tercourse with heaven and earth becomes part of his 
daily food. In the presence of nature a wild de- 
light runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. 
Nature says, —he is my creature, and maugre all 
his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. 
Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour 
and season yields its tribute of delight; for every 
hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a 
different state of the mind, from breathless noon to 
erimmest midnight. Nature is a setting that fits 
equally well a comic or a mourning piece. In good 
health, the air is a cordial of incredible virtue. 
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twi- 
light, under a clouded sky, without having in my 
thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I 
have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to 
the brink of fear.* In the woods, too, a man casts 
off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what 
period soever of life, is always a child. In the 
woods is perpetual youth. Within these planta- 
tions of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a per- 
ennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not 
how he should tire of them in a thousand years. _In 
the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I 
feel that nothing can befall me in life, —no dis- 
grace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which 
nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, 


» 


16 NATURE. 


—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted 
into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I 
become a transparent eye-ball; [am nothing; I see 
all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate 
through me; I am part or parcel of God. The 
name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and 
accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — 
master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. 
I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. 
In the wilderness, I find something more dear and 
connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil 
landscape, and especially in the distant line of the 
horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his 
own nature. . 

The greatest delight which the fields and woods 
minister is the suggestion of an occult relation be- 
tween man and the vegetable. I am not alone and 
unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. 
The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to 
me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is 
not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher 
thought or a better emotion coming over me, when 
I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right. 

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this 
delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or in 
a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these 
pleasures with great temperance. [For nature is 
not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same 


NATURE. 17 


scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glit- 
tered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread 
with melancholy to-day. Nature always wears the 
colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under ca- 
lamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. 
Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape 
felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. 
The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less 


worth in the population. 
VOL. I. 2 


CHAPTER II. 
COMMODITY. 


WHOEVER considers the final cause of the world 
will discern a multitude of uses that enter as parts 
into that result. They all admit of being thrown 
into one of the following classes: “Commodity ; 

Beauty ; Language ; and Discipline. iv 

Under the general name of commodity, I rank 

all those advantages which our senses owe to na- 
“ib 2, ture. This, ofcourse, is a benefit which is tempo- 
rary and mediate, not ultimate, like its service to the 





soul. Yet although low, it is perfect in its kind, 
and is the only use of nature which all men appre- 
hend. The misery of man appears like childish 
petulance, when we explore the steady and prodigal 





provision that has been made for his support and 
delight on this green ball which floats him through 
the heavens. What angels invented these splendid 
‘ornaments, these rich conveniences, this ocean of 
‘air above, this ocean of water beneath, this firma- 
ment of earth between? this zodiac of lights, this 
‘tent of dropping clouds, this striped coat of cli- 
mates, this fourfold year? Beasts, fire, water, 
\ 


< 


COMMODITY. 19 


stones, and corn serve him. The field is at once 
his floor, his work-yard, his play-ground, his garden, 
and his bed. 
“ More servants wait on man 
Than he ’ll take notice of.” 

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the 
material, but is also the process and the result. 
All the parts incessantly work into each other’s 
hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the 
seed ; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows / 
the vapor to the field ; the ice, on the other side of 
the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds 
the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus 
the endless circulations of the divine charity nour- 
ish man. j 

The useful arts are reproductions or new com-- 
binations by the wit of man, of the same natural 
benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring 


gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable, _. bey 
of Atolus’s bag, and carries the two and thirty ~ 


winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish fric- 
tion, he paves the road with iron bars, and} mount- 
ing a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and 
merchandise behind him, he darts through the 
country, from town to town, like an eagle or a 
swallow through the air. By the aggregate of 
these aids, how is the face of the world changed, 
from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The 


20 COMMODITY. 


private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, 
built for him. He goes to the post-office, and the 
human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, 
and the human race read and write of all that hap- 
pens, for him; to the court-house, and nations re- 
pair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, 
and the human race go forth every morning, and 
shovel out the snow, and cut a path for him. 

But there is no need of specifying particulars in 
this class of uses. The catalogue is endless, and 
the examples so obvious, that I shall leave them to 
the reader’s reflection, with the general rem&rk, 
that this mercenary benefit is one which has re- 
spect to a farther good. A man is fed, not that he 
may be fed, but that he may work. 


CHAPTER III. 
BEAUTY. 


A NOBLER want of man is served by nature, 
namely, the love of Beauty. 

The ancient Greeks called the world kocpos, 
beauty. Such is the constitution of all things, or 
such the plastic power of the human eye, that the 
primary forms, as the sky, the mountain, the tree, 
the animal, give us a delight in and for them- 
selves ; a pleasure arising from outline, color, mo- 
tion, and grouping. This seems partly owing to 
the eye itself. The eye is the best of artists. By 
the mutual action of its structure and of the laws 
of light, perspective is produced, which integrates 
every mass of objects, of what character soever, 
into a well colored and shaded globe, so that where 
the particular objects are mean and unaffecting, the 
landscape which they compose is round and sym- 
metrical. And as the eye is the best composer, so 
light is the first of painters. There is no object so 
foul that intense light will not make beautiful. 
And the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a 
sort of infinitude which it hath, like space and 


22, BEAUTY. 


time, make all matter gay. Even the corpse has 
its own beauty. But besides this general grace 
diffused over nature, almost all the individual 
forms are agreeable to the eve. as is proved by 
our endless imitations of some of them, as the 
acorn, the grape, the pine-cone, the wheat-ear, the 
egg, the wings and forms of most birds, the lion’s 
claw, the serpent, the butterfly, sea-shells, flames, 
clouds, buds, leaves, and the forms of many trees, 
as the palm. 

For better consideration, we may distribute the 
aspects of Beauty in a threefold manner. 

1. First, the simple perception of natural forms 
is a delight. The influence of the forms and ac- 
tions in nature is so needful to man, that, in its 
lowest functions, it seems to lie on the confines of 
commodity and beauty. To the body and mind 
which have been cramped by noxious work or 
company, nature is medicinal and restores their 
tone. The tradesman, the attorney comes out of 
the din and craft of the street and sees the sky 
and the woods, and is a man again. In their eter- 
nal calm, he finds himself. [The health of the eye 
‘seems to demand a horizon. We are never tired, 
‘so long as we can see far enough.| 

But in other hours, Nature satisfies by its loveli- 
ness, and without any mixture of corporeal benefit. 
I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top 


BEAUTY. 93 


over against my house, from day-break to sun-rise, 
with emotions which an angel might share. The 
long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the 
sea of crimson light. From the earth, as a shore, 
I look out into that silent sea. I seem to partake 
its rapid transformations; the active enchantment 
reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with 
the morning wind. How does Nature deify us 
with a few and cheap elements! Give me health_7 
and a day, and I will make the pomp of empe- ? 
rors ridiculous. The dawn is my Assyria; the sun-/” 
set and moon-rise my Paphos, and unimaginable 
realms of faerie ; broad noon shall be my England 
of the senses and the understanding; the night 
shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and 
dreams. | 

Not less excellent, except for our less suscep- 
tibility in the afternoon, was the charm, last even- 
ing, of a January sunset. ‘The western clouds 
divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes 
modulated with tints of unspeakable softness, and 
the air had so much life and sweetness that it was 
a pain to come within doors. What was it that 
nature would say? Was there no meaning in the 
live repose of the valley behind the mill, and which 
Homer or Shakspeare could not re-form for me in 
words ? The leafless trees become spires of flame 
in the sunset, with the blue east for their back- 


24 BEAUTY. 


ground, and the stars of the dead calices of flow- 
ers, and every withered stem and stubble rimed 
with frost, contribute something to the mute mu- 
sic. | 

The inhabitants of cities suppose that the coun- 
try landscape is pleasant only half the year. I 
please myself with the graces of the winter scen- 
ery, and believe that we are as much touched by it 
as by the genial influences of summer. ‘To the at- 
tentive eye, each moment of the year has its own 
beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every 
hour, a picture which was never seen before, and 
which shall never be seen again. The heavens 
change every moment, and reflect their glory or 
gloom on the plains beneath. The state of the 
crop in the surrounding farms alters the expression 
of the earth from week to week. The succession 
of native plants in the pastures and roadsides, 
which makes the. silent clock by which time tells 
the summer hours, will make even the divisions of 
the day sensible to a keen observer. ‘The tribes of 
birds and insects, like the plants punctual to their 
time, follow each other, and the year has room for 
all. By watercourses, the variety is greater. In 
July, the blue pontederia or pickerel-weed blooms 
in large beds in the shallow parts of our pleasant 
river, and swarms with yellow butterflies in con- 
tinual motion. Art cannot rival this pomp of pur. 


BEAUTY. 25 


ple and gold. Indeed the river is a perpetual gala, 
and boasts each month a new ornament. 

But this beauty of Nature which is seen and 
felt as beauty, is the least part. The shows of day, 
the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, or- 
chards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in 
still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, be- 
come shows merely, and mock us with their unreal- 
ity. Go out of the house to see the moon, and ’t is | 
mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light 
shines upon your necessary journey. The beauty 
that shimmers in the yellow afternoons of October, 
who ever could clutch it? Go forth to find it, and | 
it is gone; *t is only a mirage as you look from the! 
windows of diligence. 

2. The presence of a higher, namely, of the spirit- 
ual element is essential to its perfection. The high 
and divine beauty which can be loved without ef- 
feminacy, is that which is found in combination 
with the human will. Beauty is the mark God 
sets upon virtue. Every natural action is graceful. 
Every heroic act is also decent, and causes the 
place and the bystanders to shine. | We are taught 
by great actions that the universe is the property 
of every individual in it.) Every rational creature 
has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, 
if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may 
creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as 


26 BEAUTY. 


most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his 
constitution. In proportion to the energy of his 
thought and will, he takes up the world into him- 
self. ‘“ All those things for which men plough, 
build, or sail, obey virtue ;” said Sallust. ‘“ The 
winds and waves,” said Gibbon, “are always on 
the side of the ablest navigators.” So are the sun 
and moon and all the stars of heaven. Whena 
noble act is done, — perchance in a scene of great 
natural beauty ; when Leonidas and his three hun- 
dred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the 
sun and moon come each and look at them once in 
the steep defile of Thermopyle ; when Arnold 
Winkelried, in the high Alps, under the shadow 
of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Aus- 
trian spears to break the line for his comrades ; 
are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of 
the scene to the beauty of the deed? When the 
bark of Columbus nears the shore of America ; — 
before it, the beach lined with savages, fleeing out 
of all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and 
the purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago 
around, can we separate the man from the living 
picture? Does not the New World clothe his form 
with her palm-groves and savannahs as fit dra- 
pery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like 
air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry 
Vane was dragged up the Tower-hill, sitting on 


BEAUTY. 27 


a sled, to suffer death as the champion of the Eng- 
lish laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, 
“You never sate on so glorious a seat!” Charles 
II., to intimidate the citizens of London, caused 
the patriot Lord Russell to be drawn in an open 
coach through the principal streets of the city on 
his way to the scaffold. “ But,” his biographer 
says, “‘the multitude imagined they saw liberty 
and virtue sitting by his side.” In private places, 
among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism 
seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its tem- 
ple, the sun as itscandle. Nature stretches out her 
arms tc embrace man, only let his thoughts be of 
equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his 
steps with the rose and the violet, and bend her 
lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of 
her darling child. Only let his thoughts be of 
equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. 
A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and 
makes the central figure of the visible sphere. 
Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate them- 
selves fitly in our memory with the geography and 
climate of Greece. The visible heavens and earth 
sympathize with Jesus. And fin common life whoso-) ' 
ever has seen a person of powerful character and 
happy genius, will have remarked how easily he 
took all things along with him, — the persons, the 
opinions, and the day, and nature became ancillary 
toa man. | 


28 } BEAUTY. 


3. There is still another aspect under which the 
beauty of the world may be viewed, namely, as it 
becomes an object of the intellect. Beside the re- 
lation of things to virtue, they have a relation to 
thought. The intellect searches out the absolute 
order of things as they stand in the mind of God, . 
and without the colors of affection. The intellectual 
and the active powers seem to succeed each other, 
and the exclusive activity of the one generates the 


exclusive activity of the other. There is something 


unfriendly in each to the other, but they are like 
the alternate periods of feeding and working in 
animals; each prepares and will be followed by 
the other. Therefore does beauty, which, in re- 
lation to actions, as we have seen, comes unsought, 
and comes because it is unsought, remain for the 


apprehension and pursuit of the intellect; and then 


again, in its turn, of the active power. Nothing 


divine dies. All good is eternally reproductive. 


hemiebiiitegieeree 


The beauty of nature re-forms itself in the mind, 
and not for barren contemplation, but for new cre- 
ation. 

All men are in some degree impressed by the 
face of the world; some men even to delight. This — 


‘love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same 
| love in such excess, that, not content with admir- 


ing, they seek to embody it in new forms. The 
creation of beauty is Art. 


BEAUTY. 29 


The production of a work of art throws a light 
upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is 
an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the 
result or expression of nature, in miniature. For 
although the works of nature are innumerable and 
all different, the result or the expression of them 
all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms 
radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun- 
beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous 
impression on the mind. What is common to them 
all, —that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. 
The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of nat- 
ural forms, — the totality of nature; which the 
Italians expressed by defining beauty “il piu nell’ 
uno.” Nothing is quite beautiful alone; nothing/ 
but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is \ 
only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal 
grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the 
musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate 
this radiance of the world on one point, and each 
in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty 
which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art a 
nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus 
in art does Nature work through the will of a man 
filled with the beauty of her first works. ° 

The world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the 
desire of beauty. This element I call an ultimate 
end. No reason can be asked or given why the 


80 BEAUTY. 


soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and pro- 
foundest sense, is one expression for the universe. 
bod is the all-fair. Truth, and goodness, and 
‘beauty, are but different faces of the same All. 
‘But beauty in nature is not ultimate. It is the 
herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not 
‘alone a solid and satisfactory good. It must stand 
as a part, and not’as yet the last or highest expres- 
sion of the final cause of Nature. 


CHAPTER IV. 
LANGUAGE. 


LANGUAGE is a third use which Nature subserves 
toman. Nature is the vehicle of thought, and in 
a simple, double, and three-fold degree. 

1. Words are signs of natural facts. 

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of par- 
ticular spiritual facts. 

3. Nature is the symbol of spirit. 

1. Words are signs of natural facts. The use 
of natural history is to give us aid in supernatural 
history ; the use of the outer creation, to give us 
language for the beings and changes of the inward 
creation. Every word which is used to express 
a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, 
is found to be borrowed from some material ap- 
pearance. tight means straight ; wrong means 


\ 


twisted. Spirit primarily means wind ; trans- | 


gression, the crossing of a line ; supercilious, the 
raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to ex- 
press emotion, the head to denote thought; and 
thought and emotion are words borrowed from 
sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual 


82 LANGUAGE. 


nature. Most of the process by which this trans- 
formation is made, is hidden from us in the re- 
mote time when language was framed; but the 
same tendency may be daily observed in children. 
Children and savages use only nouns or names of 
things, which they convert into verbs, and apply to 
analogous mental acts. 

2. But this origin of all words that convey a 
spiritual import, — so conspicuous a fact in the his- 
tory of language, —is our least debt to nature. It 
is not words only that are emblematic; it is things 
which are emblematic. Every natural fact is a 
symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance 
in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, 
and that state of the mind can only be described 
by presenting that natural appearance as its pic- 
ture. . An enraged man is a lion, a cunning man is 
a fox, a firm man is a rock, a learned man is a 
torch. A lamb is innocence; a snake is subtle 
spite; flowers express to us the delicate affections. 
Light and darkness are our familiar expression for 
knowledge and ignorance ; and heat for love. Visi- 
ble distance behind and before us, is respectively 
our image of memory and hope. 

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour 
'and is not reminded of the flux of all things? 
|) Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that 
) propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all 


LANGUAGE. 33 


influence. Man is conscious of a universal soul 
within or behind his individual life, wherein, as in 
a firmament, the natures of Justice, Truth, Love, 
Freedom, arise and shine. ‘This universal soul 
he calls Reason: it is not mine, or thine, or his, 
but we are its; we are its property and men, And 
the blue sky in which the private earth is buried, 
the sky with its eternal calm, and full of everlast- 
ing orbs, is the type of Reason. That which intel- 
lectually considered we call Reason, considered in 
relation to nature, we call Spirit. Spirit is the 
Creator. Spirit hath life in itself. And man in 
all ages and countries embodies it in his language 
as the FATHER. 

It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or 
capricious in these analogies, but that they are 
constant, and pervade nature. These are not the 
dreams of a few poets, here and there, but man is 
an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. 
He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of 
relation passes from every other being to him. 
And neither can man be understood without these 
objects, nor these objects without man. All the 
facts in natural history taken by themselves, have 
no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But 
marry it to human history, and it is full of life. 
Whole floras, all Linnzus’ and Buffon’s volumes, 


are dry catalogues of facts; but the most trivial of 
VOL. I. 3 





34 LANGUAGE. 


‘these facts, the habit of a plant, the organs, or 
ore or noise of an insect, applied to the illustra- 
tion of a fact in intellectual philosophy, or in any 
“way associated to human nature, affects us in the 
most lively and agreeable manner. The seed of a 
plant, —to what affecting analogies in the nature 
of man is that little fruit made use of, in all dis- 
course, up to the voice of Paul, who calls the hu- 
man corpse a seed, — “ It is sown a natural body; 
it is raised a spiritual body.” The motion of the 
earth round its axis and round the sun, makes the 
day and the year. These are certain amounts of 
brute light and heat. But is there no intent of an 
analogy between man’s life and the seasons? And 
do the seasons gain no grandeur or pathos from 
that analogy? The instincts of the ant are very 
unimportant considered as the ant’s; but the mo- 
ment a ray of relation is seen to extend from it to 
man, and the little drudge is seen to be a monitor, 
a little body with a mighty heart, then all its hab-_ 
its, even that said to be recently observed, that it 
never sleeps, become sublime. 

Because of this radical correspondence between 
visible things and human thoughts, savages, who 
have only what is necessary, converse in figures. 
As we go back in history, language becomes more 
picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry ; 
or all spiritual facts are represented by natural 


LANGUAGE. oe) 


symbols. The same symbols are found to make 
the original elements of all languages. It has 
moreover been observed, that the idioms of all 
languages approach each other in passages of the 
greatest eloquence and power. And as this is the 
first language, so is it the last. This immediate 
dependence of language upon nature, this conver- 
sion of an outward phenomenon into a type of 
somewhat in human life, never loses its power to 
affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to 
the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or 
backwoodsman, which all men relish. 

A man’s power to connect his thought with its 
proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the 
simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love 
of truth and his desire to communicate it without 
loss. The corruption of man is followed by the cor- 
ruption of language. “When simplicity of character 
and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the 
prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, 
of pleasure, of power, and of praise, — and duplic- 
ity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, 
the power over nature as an interpreter of the will 
is In a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be cre- 
ated, and old words are perverted to stand for things 
which are not ; a paper currency is employed, when 
there is‘no bullion in the vaults. In due time the 
fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stim- 


86 LANGUAGE. 


ulate the understanding or the affections. Hun- 
dreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized 
nation who for a short time believe and make others 
believe that they see and utter truths, who do not 
of themselves clothe one thought in its natural gar- 
ment, but who feed unconsciously on the language 
created by the primary writers of the country, those, 
namely, who hold primarily on nature. 

But wise men pierce this rotten diction and 
fasten words again to visible things; so that pictur- 


esque language is at once a commanding certificate 


that he who employs it is a man in alliance with 
truth and God. The moment our discourse rises 
above the ground line of familiar facts and is in- 
flamed with passion or exalted by thought, it clothes 
itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if 
he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a 
material image more or less luminous arises in his 
mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which 
furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence, good 
writing and brilliant discourse are perpetual alle- 


‘ gories. This imagery is spontaneous. It is the 


blending of experience with the present action of 
the mind. It is proper creation. It is the work- 
ing of the Original Cause through the instruments 
he has already made. 

These facts may suggest the advantage which the 
country-life possesses, for a powerful mind, over the 


LANGUAGE. St 


artificial and curtailed life of cities. We know 
more from nature than we can at will communicate. 
Its light flows into the mind evermore, and we for- 
get its presence. ‘The poet, the orator, bred in the 
woods, whose senses have been nourished by their 
fair and appeasing changes, year after year, with- 
out design and without heed, — shall not lose their 
lesson altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil 
of politics. Long hereafter, amidst agitation and 
terror in national councils, — in the hour of revolu- 
tion, — these solemn images shall reappear in their 
morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the 
thoughts which the passing events shall awaken. 
At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods 
wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, 
and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw 
and heard them in his infancy. And with these 
forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power 
are put into his hands. 

3. We are thus assisted by natural objects in the 
expression of particular meanings. But how great 
a language to convey such pepper-corn informations! 
Did it need such noble races of creatures, this pro- 
fusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to fur- 
nish man with the dictionary and grammar of his 
municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand cipher 
to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel 
that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are 


38 LANGUAGE. 


able. We are like travellers using the cinders of 
a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that 
it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, 
we cannot avoid the question whether the charac- 
ters are not significant of themselves. Have moun- 
tains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what 
we consciously give them when we employ them as 
emblems of our thoughts? The world is emblem- 
atic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the 
whole of nature 1s a metaphor of the human “mind. 

The laws of moral nature answer to those of mat- 
ter as face to face in a glass. ‘The visible world 
and the relation of its parts, is the dial plate of ‘he 
invisible.” {The axioms of physics translate the 
laws of ethics} Thus, ‘“ the whole is greater than its 
part 3i0 *: reaction is equal to action;” ‘the small- 
est weight may be made to lift the greatest, the dif- 
ference of weight being compensated by time;” and 
many the like propositions, which have an ethical as 
well as physical sense. These propositions have a 
much more extensive and universal sense when ap- 
plied to human life, than when confined to techni- 
cal use. 

In like manner, the memorable words of history 
and the proverbs of nations consist usually of a 
natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of a 
moral truth. Thus; A rolling stone gathers no 
‘moss ; A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; 


LANGUAGE. 39 


A cripple in the right way will beat a racer in the\_ 
wrong; Make hay while the sun shines; ’T is hard 

to carry a full cup even; Vinegar is the son of 

wine; The last ounce broke the camel’s back ; 

Long-lived trees make roots first; and the like. 

In their primary sense these are trivial facts, but | 
we repeat them for the value of their analogical 
import. What is true of proverbs, is true of all 

fables, parables, and allegories. 

This relation between the mind and matter zs 
not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of 
God, and so is free to be known by all men. It 
appears to men, or it does not appear. When in 
fortunate hours we ponder this miracle, the wise 
man doubts if at all other times he is not blind and 
deaf ; 

“‘ Can these things be, 


And overcome us like a summer’s cloud, 
Without our special wonder ? ” 


for the universe becomes transparent, and the light 
of higher laws than its own shines through it. It is 
the standing problem which has exercised the won- 
der and the study of every fine genius since the 
world began; from the era of the Egyptians and 
the Brahmins to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of 
Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the 
Sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as 
each prophet comes by, he tries his fortune at read- 


40 LANGUAGE. 


ing her riddle. There seems to be a necessity in 
spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day 
and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid 
and alkali, preéxist in necessary Ideas in the mind 
of God, and are what they are by virtue of pre- 
ceding affections in the world of spirit. A Fact is 
the end or last issue of spirit. The visible creation 
is the terminus or the circumference of the invisi- 
ble world. “Material objects,” said a French 
philosopher, “are necessarily kinds of scoriew of 
the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must 
always preserve an exact relation to their first 
origin; in other words, visible nature must have a 
spiritual and moral side.” 

This doctrine is abstruse, and though the im- 
ages of “garment,” “scorie,” “ mirror,” &c., may 
stimulate the fancy, we must summon the aid of 
subtler and more vital expositors to make it plain. 

“‘ Kivery scripture is to be interpreted by the same 
spirit which gave it forth,’ — is the fundamental 
law of criticism. A life in harmony with Nature, 
‘the love of truth and of virtue, will purge the eyes 
‘to understand her text. By degrees we may come 
to know the primitive sense of the permanent ob- 
jects of nature, so that the world shall be to us an 
open book, and every form significant of its hidden 
life and final cause. 

A new interest surprises us, whilst, under the 


LANGUAGE. 41 


view now suggested, we contemplate the fearful 
extent and multitude of objects; since “every ob- 
ject rightly seen, unlocks a new faculty of the soul.” 
That which was unconscious truth, becomes, when 
interpreted and detined in an object, a part of the 
domain of knowledge, — a new weapon in the mag- 
azine of power. 


CHAPTER VY 
DISCIPLINE. 


In view of the significance of nature, we arrive 
at once at a new fact, that nature is a discipline. 
This use of the world includes the preceding uses, 
as parts of itself. 

Space, time, society, labor, climate, food, locomo- 
tion, the animals, the mechanical forces, give us 
sincerest lessons, day by day, whose meaning is un- 
limited. They educate both the Understanding 
and the Reason. Every property of matter is a 
school for the understanding, — its solidity or re- 
sistance, its inertia, its extension, its figure, its di- 
visibility. The understanding adds, divides, com- 
bines, measures, and finds nutriment and room for 
its activity in this worthy scene. Meantime, Rea- 
son transfers all these lessons into its own world of 
thought, by perceiving the analogy that marries 
Matter and Mind. 

1. Nature is a discipline of the understanding in 
intellectual truths. Our dealing with sensible ob- 
jects is a constant exercise in the necessary lessons 
of difference, of likeness, of order, of being and 


DISCIPLINE. 48 


seeming, of progressive arrangement; of ascent 
from particular to general; of combination to one 
end of manifold forces. Proportioned to the impor- 
tance of the organ to be formed, is the extreme care 
with which its tuition is provided, —a care preter- 
mitted in no single case. What tedious training, day 
after day, year after year, never ending, to form 
the common sense; what continual reproduction of 
annoyances, inconveniences, dilemmas ; what rejoic- 
ing over us of little men ; what disputing of prices, 
what reckonings of interest, —-and all to form the 
Hand of the mind ;— to instruct us that “ good || 
thoughts are no better than good dreams, unless 
they be executed! ”’ 

The same good office is performed by Property 
and its filial systems of debt and credit. Debt,) 


grinding debt, whose iron face the widow, the or-| 
phan, and the sons of genius fear and hate ;—, 
debt, which consumes so much time, which so crip- 
ples and disheartens a great spirit with cares that’ 
seem so base, is a preceptor whose lessons cannot 
be forgone, and is needed most by those who suf- 
fer frony it most. Moreover, property, which has 
been well compared to snow, — “if it fall level to- 
day, it will be blown into drifts to-morrow,” — is 
the surface action of internal machinery, like the 
index on the face of a clock. Whilst now it is the 
gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving, in 


44 DISCIPLINE. 


the foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder 
laws. 

The whole character and fortune of the individ- 
ual are affected by the least inequalities in the 
culture of the understanding ; for example, in the 
perception of differences. Therefore is Space, and 
therefore Time, that man may know that things 
are not huddled and lumped, but sundered and 
individual. A bell and a plough have each their 
use, and neither can do the office of the other. 
Water is good to drink, coal to burn, wool to wear ; 
but wool cannot be drunk, nor water spun, nor coal 
eaten. The wise man shows his wisdom in separa- 
| tion, in gradation, and his scale of creatures and of 
merits is as wide as nature. The foolish have no 
‘range in their scale, but suppose every man is as 
every other man. What is not good they call the 
worst, and what is not hateful, they call the best. 

In like manner, what good heed Nature forms 

Sinus! She pardons no mistakes. Her yea is yea, 
, and her nay, nay. 

The first steps in Agriculture, Astronomy, Zo- 
ology (those first steps which the farmer, the 
hunter, and the sailor take), teach that Nature’s 
dice are always loaded ; that in her heaps and rub- 

' bish are concealed sure and useful results. 
How calmly and genially the mind apprehends 
one after another the laws of physics! What 


DISCIPLINE. 45 


noble emotions dilate the mortal as he enters into 
the counsels of the creation, and feels by knowl- 
edge the privilege to Bg! His insight refines him. | 
The beauty of nature shines in his own breast. \ 
Man is greater that he can see this, and the uni-, 
verse less, because Time and Space relations vanish, 
as laws are known. 

Here again we are impressed and even daunted 
by the immense Universe to be explored. ‘“ Whaty , 
we know is a point to what we do not know.” V 
Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the 
problems suggested concerning Light, Heat, Elec- 
tricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge 
whether the interest of natural science is likely to 
be soon exhausted. 

Passing by many particulars of the discipline of 
nature, we must not omit to specify two. 

The exercise of the Will, or the lesson of power, 
is taught in every event. From the child’s succes- 
sive possession of his several senses up to the hour 
when he saith, ‘Thy will be done!” he is learn- 
ing the secret that he can reduce under his will, 
not only particular events but great classes, nay, 
the whole series of events, and so conform all facts 
to his character. Nature is thoroughly mediate. 
It is made to serve. It receives the dominion of 
man as meekly as the ass on which the Saviour 
rode. It offers all its kingdoms to man as the 


46 DISCIPLINE. 


raw material which he may mould into what is use- 
ful. Man is never weary of working it up. He 
forges the subtile and delicate air into wise and 
* melodious words, and gives them wing as angels of 
persuasion and command. One after another his 
victorious thought comes up with and reduces all 
things, until the world becomes at last only a real- 
ized will, — the double of the man. 

2. Sensible objects conform to the premonitions 
of Reason and reflect the conscience. All things 
are moral; and in their boundless changes have an 
unceasing reference to spiritual nature. Therefore 
is nature glorious with form, color, and motion; 
that every globe in the remotest heaven, every 
chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the 
laws of life, every change of vegetation from the 
first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the 
tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine, every 
animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, 
shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and 
wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. There- 
fore is Nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all 
her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. 
Prophet and priest, David, Isaiah, Jesus, have 
drawn deeply from this source. This ethical char- 
acter so penetrates the bone and marrow of nature, 
as to seem the end for which it was made. What- 
ever private purpose is answered by any member 


DISCIPLINE. 47 


or part, this is its public and universal function, 
and is never omitted. Nothing in nature is ex- 
hausted in its first use. When a thing has served 
an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an 
ulterior service. In God, every end is converted 
into a new means. Thus the use of commodity, 
regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it 
is to the mind an education in the doctrine of Use, 
namely, that a thing is good only so far as it serves; 
that a conspiring of parts and efforts to the pro- 
duction of an end is essential to any being. The 
first and gross manifestation of this truth is our 
inevitable and hated training in values and wants, 
in corn and meat. 

It has already been illustrated, that every nat- 
ural process is a version of a moral sentence. The 
moral law lies at the centre of nature and radiates 
to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow 
of every substance, every relation, and every pro- 
cess. All things with which we deal, preach to us. 
What is a farm but a mute gospel? The chaff 
and the wheat, weeds and plants, blight, rain, in- 
sects, sun, —it is a sacred emblem from the first 
furrow of spring to the last stack which the snow 
of winter overtakes in the fields. But the sailor, 
the shepherd, the miner, the merchant, in their 
several resorts, have each an experience precisely 
parallel, and leading to the same conclusion: be- 


48 DISCIPLINE. 


cause all organizations are radically alike. Nor 
can it be doubted that this moral sentiment which 
thus scents the air, grows in the grain, and impreg- 
nates the waters of the world, is caught by man 
and sinks into his soul. The moral influence of 
jnature upon every individual is that amount of 
‘truth which it illustrates to him. Who can esti- 
mate this? Who can guess how much firmness 
\ the sea-beaten rock has taught the fisherman ? how 
( much tranquillity has been reflected to man from 
/ the azure sky, over whose unspotted deeps the 
winds forevermore drive flocks of stormy clouds, 
and leave no wrinkle or stain? how much indus- 
try and providence and affection we have caught 
from the pantomime of brutes? What a searching 
preacher of self-command is the varying phenome- 
non of Health! 

Herein is especially apprehended the unity of 
Nature,— the unity in variety, — which meets us 
everywhere. All the endless variety of things 
make an identical impression. -Xenophanes com- 
plained in his old age, that, look where he would, 
all things hastened back to Unity. He was weary 
of seeing the same entity in the tedious variety of 
forms. The fable of Proteus has a cordial truth. 
A leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time, is re- 

_ lated to the whole, and partakes of the perfection 
of the whole. Each particle is a microcosm, and 
faithfully renders the likeness of the world. 


DISCIPLINE. 49 


Not only resemblances exist in things whose an- 
alogy is obvious, as when we detect the type of the 
human hand in the flipper of the fossil saurus, but 
also in objects wherein there is great superficial 
unlikeness. Thus architecture is called ‘“ frozen) 
music,” by De Staél and Goethe. Vitruvius) 
thought an architect should be a musician. ‘ AS 
Gothic church,” said Coleridge, “is a petrified re-) 
ligion.” Michael Angelo maintained, that, to an\ 
architect, a knowledge of anatomy is essential. In\ 
Haydn’s oratorios, the notes present to the imagi-) 
nation not only motions, as of the snake, the stag, 
and the elephant, but colors also; as the green 
grass. The law of harmonic sounds reappears in 
the harmonic colors. The granite is differenced in| 
its laws only by the more or less of heat from the 
river that wears it away. The river, as it flows, 
resembles the air that flows over it; the air resem- 
bles the light which traverses it with more subtile 
currents ; the light resembles the heat which rides 
with it through Space. ach creature is only a 
modification of the other; the likeness in them is 
more than the difference, and their radical law is 
one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of 
one organization, holds true throughout nature. 
So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it 
lies under the undermost garment of nature, and. 


betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For it per- 
VOL. I. 4 


50 DISCIPLINE. 


vades Thought also. Every universal truth which 
we express in words, implies or supposes every 
other truth. Omne verum vero consonat. It is 
like a great circle on a sphere, comprising all pos- 
sible circles ; which, however, may be drawn and 
comprise it in hike manner. Every guch truth is 
the absolute Ens seen from one side. But it has 
innumerable sides. 
The central Unity is still more conspicuous in 
actions. Words are finite organs of the infinite 


‘Q mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what 


is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. 
An action is the perfection and publication of 
thought. <A right action seems to fill the eye, and 
to be related to all nature. ‘The wise man, in 
doing one thing, does ali; or, in the one thing he 
does rightly, he sees the likeness of all which is 
done rightly.” 

Words and actions are not the attributes of 
brute nature. They introduce us to the human 
form, of which all other organizations appear to 
be degradations. When this appears among so 
many that surround it, the spirit prefers it to all 
others. It says, ‘‘ From such as this have I drawn 
joy and knowledge; in such as this have I found 
and beheld myself ; I will speak to it; it can speak 
again; it can yield me thought already formed and 
alive.” In fact, the eye, — the mind, —is always 


DISCIPLINE. 51 


accompanied by these forms, male and female ; and 
these are incomparably the richest informations of 
the power and order that lie at the heart of things. 
Unfortunately every one of them bears the marks 
as of some injury; is marred and superficially de- 
fective. Nevertheless, far different from the deaf 
and dumb nature around them, these all rest like 
fountain-pipes on the unfathomed sea of thought 
and virtue whereto they alone, of all organizations, 
are the entrances. 

It were a pleasant inquiry to follow into detail 
their ministry to our education, but where would it 
stop? We are associated in adolescent and adult 
life with some friends, who, like skies and waters, 
are coextensive with our idea; who, answering 
each to a certain affection of the soul, satisfy our 
desire on that side; whom we lack power to put at 
such focal distance from us, that we can mend or 
even analyze them. We cannot choose but love 
them. When much intercourse with a friend has 
supplied us with a standard of excellence, and has 
increased our respect for the resources of God who 
thus sends a real person to outgo our ideal; when 
he has, moreover, become an object of thought, 
and, whilst his character retains all its unconscious 
effect, is converted in the mind into solid and sweet 
wisdom, — it is a sign to us that his office is clos- 
ing, and he is commonly withdrawn from our sight 
in a short time. 


CHAPTER VI. 
IDEALISM. 


Tuus is the unspeakable but intelligible and 
practicable meaning of the world conveyed to man, 
the immortal pupil, in every object of sense. To 
this one end of Discipline, all parts of nature con- 
spire. | 

A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, — 
whether this end be not the Final Cause of the 
Universe ; and whether nature outwardly éxists. 
It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call 
the World, that God will teach a human mind, and 
so makes it the receiver of a certain number of con- 
gruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, 
man and woman, house and trade. In my utter 
impotence to test the authenticity of the report of 
my senses, to know whether the impressions they 
make on me correspond with outlying objects, 
what difference does it make, whether Orion is 
up there in heaven, or some god paints the image 
in the firmament of the soul? The relations of 
parts and the end of the whole remaining the same, ~ 
what is the difference, whether land and sea inter: 


IDEALISM. 53 


act, and worlds revolve and intermingle without 
number or end, — deep yawning under deep, 
and galaxy balancing galaxy, throughout absolute 
space, — or whether, without relations of time 
and space, the same appearances are inscribed in 
the constant faith of man? Whether nature en- 
joy a substantial existence without, or is only in 
the apocalypse of the mind, it is alike useful and 
alike venerable to me. Be it what it may, it is 
ideal to me so long as I cannot try the accuracy of 
my senses. 

The frivolous make themselves merry with the 
Ideal theory, as if its consequences were burlesque; 
as if it affected the stability of nature. It surely 
does not. God never jests with us, and will not 
compromise the end of nature by permitting any 
inconsequence in its procession. Any distrust of | 
the permanence of laws would paralyze the facul-/ 
ties of man. Their permanence is sacredly re- 
spected, and his faith therein is perfect. The 
wheels and springs of man are all set to the hy- 
pothesis of the permanence of nature. We are not 
built like a ship to be tossed, but like a house to 
stand. It is a natural consequence of this struc- 
ture, that so long as the active powers predominate 
over the reflective, we resist with indignation any 
hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable 
than spirit. The broker, the wheelwright, the car- - 


54. IDEALISM. 


penter, the tollman, are much displeased at the in- 
timation. 

But whilst we acquiesce entirely in the perma- 
nence of natural laws, the question of the absolute 
existence of nature still remains open. It is the 
uniform effect of .culture on the human mind, not 
to shake our faith in the stability of particular phe- 
nomena, as of heat, water, azote; but to lead us to 
regard nature as phenomenon, not a substance; to 
attribute necessary existence to spirit; to esteem 
nature as an accident and an effect. 

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding, 
belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute 
existence of nature. In their view man and nature 
are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and 
they never look beyond their sphere. The pres- 
ence of Reason mars this faith. The first effort of 
thought tends to relax this despotism of the senses 
which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, 
and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat. 
Until this higher agency intervened, the animal 
eye sees, with wonderful accuracy, sharp outlines 
and colored surfaces. When the eye of Reason 
opens, to outline and surface are at once added 
grace and expression. These proceed from imagi- 
nation and affection, and abate somewhat of the 
angular distinctness of objects. If the Reason be 
stimulated to more earnest vision, outlines and sur. 


IDEALISM. 55 


faces become transparent, and are no longer seen ; 
causes and spirits are seen through them. The‘ 
best moments of life are these delicious awakenings | 
of the higher powers, and the reverential withdraw- 
ing of nature before its God. 

Let us proceed to indicate the effects of culture. 
1. Our first institution in the Ideal philosophy is a, 
hint from Nature herself. 

Nature is made to conspire with spirit to eman- 
cipate us. Certain mechanical changes, a small al- 
teration in our local position, apprizes us of a dual- 
ism. We are strangely affected by seeing the shore 
from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the 
tints of an unusual sky. ‘The least change in our 
point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air. 
A man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a 
coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street 
into a puppet-show. The men, the women, — talk- 
ing, running, bartering, fighting, — the earnest me- 
chanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs, 
are unrealized at once, or, at least, wholly detached 
from all relation to the observer, and seen as ap- 
parent, not substantial beings. What new thoughts 
are suggested by seeing a face of country quite fa- 
miliar, in the rapid movement of the railroad car ! 
Nay, the most wonted objects, (make a very slight 
change in the point of vision,) please us most. In 
a camera obscura, the butcher’s cart, and the figure 


56 IDEALISM. 


of one of our own family amuse us. So a portrait 
of a well-known face gratifies us. Turn the eyes 
upside down, by looking at the landscape through 
your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though 
you have seen it any time these twenty years ! 

In these cases, y mechanical means, is suggested 
the difference between the observer and the specta- 
cle, — between man and nature. Hence arises a 
pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree 
of the sublime is felt, from the fact, probably, that 
man is hereby apprized that whilst the world is a 
spectacle, something in himself is stable. 

2. Ina higher manner the poet communicates the 
same pleasure. By a few strokes he delineates, as 
on air, the sun, the mountain, the camp, the city, 
the hero, the maiden, not different from what we 
know them, but only lifted from the ground and 
afloat before the eye. He ‘unfixes the land and the 
sea, makes them revolve around the axis of his pri- 
mary thought, and disposes them anew. Possessed 
himself by a heroic passion, he uses matter as sym- © 
bols of it. The sensual man conforms thoughts to 
v things; the poet conforms things to his thoughts. 
The one esteems nature as rooted and fast; the 
other, as fluid, and impresses his being thereon. 
To him, the refractory world is ductile and flexi- 
ble; he invests dust and stones with humanity, and 
makes them the words of the Reason. The Imagi. _ 


IDEALISM. 57 


nation may be defined to be the use which the Rea- 
| son makes of the material world. Shakspeare 
possesses the power of subordinating nature for the 
purposes of expression, beyond all poets. His im- 
perial muse tosses the creation like a bauble from 
hand to hand, and uses it to embody any caprice of 
thought that is uppermost in his mind. The remo- 
test spaces of nature are visited, and the farthest 
sundered things are brought together, by a sub- 
tile spiritual connection. We are made aware that 
magnitude of material things is relative, and all ob- 
jects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the 
poet. Thus in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the 
scents and dyes of flowers he finds to be the shadow 
of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is 
his chest ; the suspicion she has awakened, is her 
ornament ; 
The ornament of beauty is Suspect, @ 
A crow which flies in heaven’s sweetest air. 

His passion is not the fruit of chance; it swells, 
as he speaks, to a city, or a state. 


No, it was builded far from accident; 

It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls 
Under the brow of thralling discontent; 

It fears not policy, that heretic, 

That works on leases of short numbered hours, 
But all alone stands hugely politic. 


In the strength of his constancy, the Pyramids 


58 IDEALISM. 


seem to him recent and transitory. The freshness 
of youth and love dazzles him with its resemblance 
to morning ; 
Take those lips away 
Which so sweetly were forsworn; 


And those eyes, — the break of day, 
Lights that do mislead the morn. 


The wild beauty of this hyperbole, | may say in 
passing, it would not be easy to match in literature. 
This transfiguration which all material objects 
undergo through the passion of the poet, — this 
power which he exerts to dwarf the great, to mag- 
nify the small, — might be illustrated by a thousand 
examples from his Plays. I have before me the 
Tempest, and will cite only these few lines. 


ARIEL. The strong based promontory 
Have I made shake, and by the spurs plucked up 
The pine and cedar. 


Prospero calls for music to soothe the frantic 
Alonzo, and his companions ; 


A solemn air, and the best comforter 
To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains 
Now useless, boiled within thy skull. 


Again ; 


The charm dissolves apace, 
And, as the morning steals upon the night, 
Melting the darkness, so their rising senses 


IDEALISM. 59 


Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle 
Their clearer reason. 

Their understanding 
Begins to swell: and the approaching tide 
Will shortly fill the reasonable shores 
That now lie foul and muddy. 


The perception of real affinities between events 
(that is to say, of ideal affinities, for those only are 
real), enables the poet thus to make free with the 
most imposing forms and phenomena of the world, 
and to assert the predominance of the soul. 

3. Whilst thus the poet animates nature with his 
own thoughts, he differs from the philosopher only 
herein, that the one proposes _ Beauty as his main 
end; the other Truth, But the philosopher, not 
less than the ‘poet, postpones the apparent order 
and relations of things to the empire of thought. 
“The problem of philosophy,” according to Plato, 
“is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a 
ground unconditioned and absolute.” It proceeds 
on the faith that a law determines all phenomena, 
which being known, the phenomena can be predicted. 
That law, when in the mind, is an idea. Its beauty 


is infinite. The true philosopher and the true poet | , 


are one, and a beauty, which is truth, and a \ 
truth, which is beauty, is the aim of both. Is not 
the charm of one of Plato’s or Aristotle’s definitions 
strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It 


60 IDEALISM. 


is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been im- 
parted to nature; that the solid seeming block of 
matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a 
thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated 
the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and 
recognized itself in their harmony, that is, seized 
their law. In physics, when this is attained, the 
memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous cata- 
logues of particulars, and carries centuries of obser- 
vation in a single formula. 

Thus even in physics, the material is degraded 
before the spiritual. The astronomer, the geom- 
eter, rely on their irrefragable analysis, and dis- 
dain the results of observation. The sublime re- 
mark of Euler on his law of arches, “This will be 
found contrary to all experience, yet is true ;” had 
already transferred nature into the mind, and left 
matter like an outcast corpse. 

4. Intellectual science has been observed to beget 
invariably a doubt of the existence of matter. Tur- 
got said, “‘ He that has never doubted the existence 
of matter, may be assured he has no aptitude for 
metaphysical inquiries.’ It fastens the attention 
upon immortal necessary uncreated natures, that is, 
upon Ideas; and in their presence we feel that the 
outward circumstance is a dream and a shade. 
Whilst we wait in this Olympus of gods, we think 
of nature as an appendix to the soul. We ascend 


IDEALISM. 61 


into their region, and know that these are the 
thoughts of the Supreme Being. ‘ These are 
they who were set up from everlasting, from the 
beginning, or ever the earth was. When he pre- 
pared the heavens, they were there; when he es- 
tablished the clouds above, when he strengthened the 
fountains of the deep. Then they were by hin, as 
one brought up with him. Of them took he coun- 
sel.” 

Their influence is proportionate. As objects of 
science they are accessible to few men. Yet all 
men are capable of being raised by piety or by pas- 
sion, into their region. And no man touches these 
divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, _ 
himself divine. Like a new soul, they renew the 
body. We become physically nimble and light- 
some; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, 
and we think it will never be so. No man fears 
age or misfortune or death in their serene company, 
for he is transported out of the district of change. 
Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice 
and Truth, we learn the difference between the ab- 
solute and the conditional or relative. We appre- 
hend the absolute. As it were, for the first time, we 
exist. We become immortal, for we learn that time 
and space are relations of matter; that with a percep- 
tion of truth or a virtuous will they have no affinity. 

5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be 


62 IDEALISM. 


fitly called the practice of ideas, or the introduc- 
tion of ideas into life, have an analogous effect 
with all lower culture, in degrading nature and 
suggesting its dependence on spirit. Kthics and 
‘religion differ herein ; that the one is the system 
Jof human duties commencing from man; the other, 
_from God. Religion includes the personality of 
God; Ethics does not. They are one to our pres- 
ent design. They both put nature under foot. The 
first and last lesson of religion is, ‘The things 
that are seen, are temporal; the things that are un- 
seen, are eternal.” It puts an affront upon nature. 
It does that for the unschooled, which philosophy 
dees for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform lan- 
guage that may be heard in the churches of the 
most ignorant sects is, — ‘‘Contemn the unsub- 
stantial shows of the world; they are vanities, 
dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of 
religion.” The devotee flouts nature. Some theo- 
sophists have arrived at a certain hostility and in- 
dignation towards matter, as the Manichean and 
Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any look- 
ing back to these flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus 
was ashamed of his body. In short, they might 
all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of ex- 
ternal beauty, ‘It is the frail and weary weed, in 
/ which God dresses the soul which he has called 


into time.” 


IDEALISM. 63 


It appears that motion, poetry, physical and in-. 
tellectual science, and religion, all tend to affect 
our convictions of the reality of the external world. 
But I own there is something ungrateful in ex- 
panding too curiously the particulars of the gen- 
eral proposition, that all culture tends to imbue ur 
with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a 
child’s love to it. ud expand and live in the warm 
day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. 
I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful 
mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to 
indicate the true position of nature in regard to 
man, wherein to establish man all right education 
tends; as the ground which to attain is the object 
of human life, that is, of man’s connection with 
nature, Culture inverts the vulgar views of na- 
ture, and brings the mind to call that apparent 
which iv uses to call real, and that real which it 
uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe 
in the external world. The belief that it appears 
only, is an afterthought, but with culture this faith 
will as surely arise on the mind as did the first. 

The advantage of the ideal theory over the pop- 
ular faith is this, that it presents the world in pre- 
cisely that view which is most desirable to the 
mind. It is, in fact, the view which Reason, both 
speculative and practical, that is, philosophy and 
virtue, take. For seen in the light of thought, the 


64 IDEALISM. 


world always is phenomenal; and virtue subordi- 
nates it to the mind. Idealism sees the world in 
God. It beholds the whole circle of persons and 
‘ things, of actions and events, of country and re- 
ligion, not as painfully accumulated, atom after 
atom, act after act, in an aged creeping Past, but 
/as one vast picture which God paints on the in- 
stant eternity for the contemplation of the soul. 
Therefore the soul holds itself off from a too trivial 
and microscopic study of the universal tablet. It 
“respects the end too much to immerse itself in the 
means. It sees somethin more important in Chris- 
tianity than the scandals of ecclesiastical history 
or the niceties of criticism; and, very incurious 
concerning persons or miracles, and not at all dis- 
turbed by chasms of historical evidence, it accepts 
from God the phenomenon, as it finds it, as the 
pure and awful form of religion in the world. It 
is not hot and passionate at the appearance of what 
it calls its own good or bad fortune, at the union 
or opposition of other persons. No man is its en- 
emy. It accepts whatsoever befalls, as part of its 
\lesson. It is a watcher more than a doer, and it is 
a, doer, only that it may the better watch. 


CHAPTER VII. 
SPIRIT. 


Ir is essential to a true theory of nature and of 
man, that it should contain somewhat progressive. 
. Uses that are exhausted or that may be, and facts 
that end in the statement, cannot be all that is true 
of this brave lodging wherein man is harbored, and 
wherein all his faculties find appropriate and end- ' 
less exercise. And all the uses of nature admit of 
being summed in one, which yields the activity of 
man an infinite scope. Through all its kingdoms, 
to the suburbs and outskirts of things, it is faithful 
to the cause whence it had its origin. It always 
speaks of Spirit. It suggests the absolute. It is 
a perpetual effect. Itis a great shadow pointing 
always to the sun behind us. 

The aspect of Nature is devout. Like the figure 
of Jesus, she stands with bended head, and hands 
folded upon the breast. The happiest man is he 
who learns from nature the lesson of worship. 

Of that ineffable essence which we call Spirit, 
he that thinks most, will say least. We can fore- 


see God in the coarse, and, as it were, distant 
VOL. I. 5 


66 SPIRIT. 


phenomena of matter; but when we try to define 
and describe himself, both language and thought 
desert us, and we are as helpless as fools and sav- 
ages. That essence refuses to be recorded in prop- 
ositions, but when man has worshipped him in- 
tellectually, the noblest ministry of nature is to 
stand as the apparition of God. It is the organ 
through which the universal spirit speaks to the 
individual, and strives to lead back the individual 
to it. 

When we consider Spirit, we see that the views 
already presented do not include the whole circum- 
ference of man. We must add some related 
thoughts. 

Three problems are put by nature to the mind; 
What is matter? Whence is it? and Whereto? 
_ The first of these questions only, the ideal theory 
answers. Idealism saith: matter is a phenomenon, 
not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the 
total disparity between the evidence of our own 
being and the evidence of the world’s being. The 
one is perfect; the other, incapable of any assur- 
ance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; 
the world is a divine dream, from which we may 
presently awake to the glories and certainties of 
day. Idealism is a hypothesis to account for na- 
ture by other principles than those of carpentry 
and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence 


SPIRIT. 67 


of matter, it does not satisfy the demands of the 
spirit. It leaves God out of me. It leaves me 
in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to 
wander without end. Then the heart resists it, 
because it balks the affections in denying substan- 
tive being to men and women. Nature is so per- 
vaded with human life that there is something of |, 
humanity in all and in every particular. But this 
theory makes nature foreign to me, and does not 
account for that consanguinity which we acknowl- 
edge to it. 

Let it stand then, in the present state of our 
knowledge, merely as a useful introductory hypoth- 
esis, serving to apprise us of the eternal distinc- 
tion between the soul and the world. 

But when, following the invisible steps of thought, 
we come to inquire, Whence is matter? and W here- 
to? many truths arise to us out of the recesses of 
consciousness. We learn that the highest is pres- } 
ent to the soul of man; that the dread universal 
essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or 
power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for | 
which all things exist, and that by which they are; 
that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout | 
nature, spirit 1s present ; one and not compound it. 
does not act upon us from without, that is, in space 
and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: | 
therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, | 


68 SPIRIT. 


does not build up nature around us but puts it 
forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth 
new branches and leaves through the pores of the 
old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests 
upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfail- 
ing fountains, and draws at his need inexhaustible 
power. Who can set bounds to the possibilities of 
man? Once inhale the upper air, being admitted 
to behold the absolute natures of justice and truth, 
and we learn that man has access to the entire 
mind of the Creator, is himself the creator in the 
finite. This view, which admonishes me where the 
sources of wisdom and power lie, and points to vir- 
tue as to 


“The golden key 
Which opes the palace of eternity,” 


carries upon its face the highest certificate of truth, 
because it animates me to create my own world 
through the purification of my soul. 

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the 
body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarna- 
tion of God, a projection of God in the uncon- 
scious. But it differs from the body in one impor- 
tant respect. It is not, like that, now subjected to 
the human will. Its serene order is inviolable by 
us. It is, therefore, to us, the present expositor of 
the divine mind. It is a fixed point whereby we 
may measure our departure. As we degenerate, 


SPIRIT. 669 


the contrast between us and our house is more evi- 
dent. We are as much strangers in nature as we 
are aliens from God. We do not understand the 
notes of birds. The fox and the deer run away 
from us; the bear and tiger rend us. We do not 
know the uses of more than a few plants, as corn 
and the apple, the potato and the vine. Is not the 
landscape, every glimpse of which hath a grandeur, 
a face of him? Yet this may show us what dis- 
cord is between man and nature, for you cannot 
freely admire a noble landscape if laborers are 
digging in the field hard by. The poet finds some- 
thing ridiculous in his delight until he is out of the 
sight of men. 


CHAPTER VIII. 
PROSPECTS. 


In inquiries respecting the laws of the world 
and the frame of things, the highest reason is al- 
ways the truest. That which seems faintly pos- 
sible, it is so refined, is often faint and dim be- 
cause it is deepest seated in the mind among’ the 
eternal verities. Empirical science is apt to cloud 
the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions 
and processes to bereave the student of the manly 
contemplation of the whole. The savant becomes 
unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends 
an entire and devout attention to truth, will see 
that there remains much to learn of his relation 
to the world, and that it is not to be learned by 
any addition or subtraction or other comparison 
of known quantities, but 1s arrived at by untaught 
sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, 
and by entire humility. He will perceive that there 
are far more excellent qualities in the student than 


¥ preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often 


more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and 
that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of 
nature than a hundred concerted experiments. 


PROSPECTS. ak 


For the problems to be solved are precisely those 
which the physiologist and the naturalist omit to 


state. It is not so pertinent to man to know all) 


the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to 
know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity 
in his constitution, which evermore separates and 
classifies things, endeavoring to reduce the most 
diverse to one form. When I behold a rich land- 


scape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly 


the order and superposition of the strata, than to 


know why all thought of multitude is lost in a 


tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honor 
minuteness in details, so long as there is no 
hint to explain the relation between things and 
thoughts; no ray upon the metaphysics of con- 
chology, of botany, of the arts, to show the rela- 
tion of the forms of flowers, shells, animals, archi- 
tecture, to the mind, and build science upon ideas. 
In a cabinet of natural history, we become sen- 
sible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy 
in regard to the most unwieldly and eccentric 
forms of beast, fish, and insect. The American 
who has been confined, in his own country, to the 
_sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is 
surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s 
at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are 
imitations also, — faint copies of an invisible ar- 
chetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so 


72 PROSPECTS. 


long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful 
congruity which subsists between man and the 
world ; of which he is lord, not because he is the 
most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head 
and heart, and finds something of himself in every 
great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, 
in every new law of color, fact of astronomy, or at- 
mospheric influence which observation or analysis 
lays open. A perception of this mystery inspires 
the muse of George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist 
of the seventeenth century. The following lines 
are part of his little poem on Man. 


“ Man is all symmetry, 
Full of proportions, one limb to another, 
And to all the world besides. 
Each part may call the farthest, brother ; 
For head with foot hath private amity, 
And both with moons and tides. 


“ Nothing hath got so far 
But man hath caught and kept it as his prey ; 
His eyes dismount the highest star : 
. He is in little all the sphere. 
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they 
Find their acquaintance there. 


( “For us, the winds do blow, 

| The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow; 
Nothing we see, but means our good, 
As our delight, or as our treasure;_ 


PROSPECTS. to 


The whole is either our cupboard of food, 
Or cabinet of pleasure. 


“'The stars have us to bed: 
Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws. 
Music and light attend our head. 
All things unto our flesh are kind, 
In their descent and being; to our mind, 
In their ascent and cause. 


“ More servants wait on man 

Than he ’Il take notice of. In every path, 
He treads down that which doth befriend him 
When sickness makes him pale and wan. 

Oh mighty love! Man is one world, and hath 
Another to attend him.” 


The perception of this class of truths makes the 
attraction which draws men to science, but the end 
is lost sight of in attention to the means. In view 
of this half-sight of science, we accept the sentence 
of Plato, that “ poetry comes nearer to vital truth 
than history.” Every surmise and vaticination of 
the mind is entitled to a certain respect, and we 
learn to prefer imperfect theories, and sentences 
which contain glimpses of truth, to digested sys- 
tems which have no one valuable suggestion. A 
wise writer will feel that the ends of study and com- 
position are best answered by announcing undis- 
covered regions of thought, and so communicating, 
through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit. 


714 PROSPECTS. 


I shall therefore conclude this essay with some 
traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet 
sang to me; and which, as they have always been 
in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, 
may be both history and prophecy. 

-*The foundations of man are not in matter, but 
“in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To 
it, therefore, the longest series of events, the old- 
est chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle 
of the universal man, from whom the known indi- 
viduals proceed, centuries are points, and all history 
is but the epoch of one degradation. 

‘We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy 
with nature. We own and disown our relation to 
it, by turns. We are like Nebuchadnezzar, de- 
throned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an 
ox. But who can set limits to the remedial force of 
spirit ? 

‘A man is a god in ruins. When men are inno- 
cent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the 1m- 
mortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, 
the world wouid be insane and rabid, if these dis- 
organizations should last for hundreds of years. It 
is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is 
the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms 
of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to 
paradise. 

‘Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was per- 


PROSPECTS. 75 


meated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature 
with his overflowing currents. Out from him 
sprang the sun and moon; from man the sun, 
from woman the moon. The laws of his mind, the 
periods of his actions externized themselves into 
day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, 
having made for himself this huge shell, his waters 
retired ; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets ; 
he is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the structure 
still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, 
once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from 
far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. 
Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the 
follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in 
his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, 
and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him 
and it. He perceives that if his law is still para- 
mount, if still he have elemental power, if his word 
is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, 
it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is in- 
stinct.’ Thus my Orphic poet sang. 

At present, man applies to nature but half his 
force. He works on the world with his understand- 
ing alone. He lives in it and masters it by a pen- 
ny-wisdom; and he that works most in it is but a 
half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his 
digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a 
selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power 


76 PROSPECTS. 


over it, is through the understanding, as by ma- 
nure; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and 
the mariner’s needle; steam, coal, chemical agricul- 
ture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist 
and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of 
power as if a banished king should buy his territo- 
ries inch by inch, instead of vaulting at once into his 
throne. Meantime, in the thick darkness, there are 
not wanting gleams of a better light, — occasional 
examples of the action of man upon nature with his 
entire force, — with reason as well as understand- 
ing. Such examples are, the traditions of miracles 
in the earliest antiquity of all nations; the history 
of Jesus Christ; the achievements of a principle, 
as in religious and political revolutions, and in the 
abolition of the slave-trade ; the miracles of enthu- 
siasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, 
and the Shakers ; many obscure and yet contested 
facts, now arranged under the name of Animal 
Magnetism; prayer; eloquence ; self-healing ; and 
the wisdom of children. These are examples of 
Reason’s momentary grasp of the sceptre ; the ex- 
ertions of a power which exists not in time or space, 
but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power. 
The difference between the actual and the ideal force 
of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in say- 
ing, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowl- 
edge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a 
morning knowledge, matutina cognitio. 


PROSPECTS. 17 


The problem of restoring to the world original 
and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of 
the soul. The ruin or the blank that we see when 
we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of 
vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and 
so they appear not transparent but opaque. The 
reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken 
and in heaps, is because man is disunited with 
himself. He cannot be a naturalist until he satis- 
fies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much 
its demand as perception. Indeed, neither can be 
perfect without the other. In the uttermost mean-\ 
ing of the words, thought is devout, and devotion. 
is thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in actual . 
life, the marriage is not celebrated. There are in- 
nocent men who worship God after the tradition of 
their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet 
extended to the use of all their faculties. And\ 
there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their 
subject under the wintry light of the understand- 
ing. Is not prayer also a study of truth, — a sally 
of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man. 
ever prayed heartily without learning something. 
But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach 
every object from personal relations and see it in 
the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle 
science with the fire of the holiest affections, then 
will God go forth anew into the creation. 


78 PROSPECTS. 


It will not need, when the mind is prepared for 
[ study, to search for objects. The invariable mark 
\ of wisdom_is to see the miraculous in the common. 
What isaday? Whatisa year? What is sum- 
mer? What is woman? What is a child? What 
is sleep? To our blindness, these things seem un- 
affecting. We make fables to hide the baldness 
of the fact and conform it, as we say, to the higher 
law of the mind. But when the fact is seen under 
the light of an idea, the gaudy fable fades and 
shrivels. We behold the real higher law. To the 
wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most 
beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to 
our own door. You also are a man. Man and 
woman and their social life, poverty, labor, sleep, 
fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none 
of these things is superficial, but that each phenom- 
enon has its roots in the faculties and affections of 
the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies 
your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to 
be solved by your hands. It were a wise inquiry 
for the closet, to compare, point by point, espe- 
cially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history 
with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind. 

So shall we come to look at the world with new 
eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the 
intellect, — What is truth? and of the affections, 
— What is good? by yielding itself passive to the 


PROSPECTS. 79 


educated Will. Then shall come to pass what my 
poet said; ‘ Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit 
alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or brute- 
ness of nature is the absence of spirit; to pure 
spirit it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. 
Every spirit builds itself a house and beyond its 
house a world and beyond its world a heaven.’ 
Know then that the world exists for you. For you 
is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that 
only can we see. All that Adam had, all that |/ 
Cesar could, you have and can do. Adam called 
his house, heaven and earth; Cesar called: his 
house, Rome ; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler’s 
trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a. 
scholar’s garret. Yet line for line and point for 
point your dominion is as great as theirs, though 
without fine names. Build therefore your own 
world. As fast as you conform your life to the 
pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great 
proportions. A correspondent revolution in things 
will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will 
disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, 
pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they 
are temporary and shall be no more seen. The 
sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up 
and the wind exhale. As when the summer comes 
from the south the snow-banks melt and the face 
of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the 


80 PROSPECTS. 


advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, 
and carry with it the beauty it visits and the song 
which enchants it; it shall draw beautiful faces, 
warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around 
its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom 
of man over nature, which cometh not with obser- 
vation, —a dominion such as now is beyond his 
dream of God, — he shall enter without more won-. 
der than the blind man feels who is gradually re- 
stored to perfect sight.’ 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY, 
AT CAMBRIDGE, AUGUST 81, 1887. 





A. AMT Loy 


ini 00 HR HA 





THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 





Mr. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN, 

I GREET you on the recommencement of our lit- 
erary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, 
perhaps, not enough of labor. We do not meet 
for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of 
histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient 
Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like 
the Troubadours; nor for the advancement of sci- 
ence, like our contemporaries in the British and 
European capitals. Thus far, our holiday has been 
simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of 
letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters 
any more. As such it is precious as the sign of an 
indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is al- 
ready come when it ought to be, and will be, aa 


thing else ; when the sluggard intellect of this con- } 


tinent will look from under its iron hds and fill the 


; 
f 


postponed expectation of the world with something | 
better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our 
day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the 
learning of other lands, draws to a close. The mil- 


84 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


lions that around us are rushing into life, cannot 
always be fed on the sere remains of foreign har- 
vests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, 
that will sing themselves. Who can doubt that 
poetry will revive and lead in anew age, as the star 
im the constellation Harp, which now flames in our 
zenith, astronomers announce, shall one day be the 
pole-star for a thousand years ? 

In this hope I accept the topic which not only 
usage but the nature of our association seem to 
prescribe to this day, — the AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 
Year by year we come up hither to read one more 
chapter of his biography. Let us inquire what 
_ light new days and events have thrown on his char- 
acter and his hopes. 

It is one of those fables which out of an unknown 
antiquity convey an unlooked-for wisdom, that_the_ 
_gods, 1 in the beginning, divided } Man into men, that 
“he might be more helpful “to himselt ; just_as the 
hand was_ divided into fingers, the better to answer 
its end. 

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and 
sublime ; that there is One Man, —present to all 
particular men only partially, or through one fac- 
ulty ; and that you must take the whole society to 
find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a 
professor, or_an engineer, ‘but. he is all. “Man i As_ 
priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 85 


and soldier. In the divided or social state these 
functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of 
whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst 
each other performs his. The fable implies that 
the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes | 
return from his own labor to embrace all the other | 
laborers. But, unfortunately, this original unit, 
this fountain of power, has been so distributed to 
multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and 
peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and can- 
not be gathered. The state of society is one in 
which the members have suffered amputation from 
the trunk, and strut about so many walking mon- 
sters, —a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an el- 
bow, but never a man. 

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into 
many things. The planter, who is Man sent out , 
into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by i 
any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He 
sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, 
and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the 
farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal 
worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of 
his craft, and the soul is is subject t to. dollars. The 


oes ‘a form ; ‘the attorney : a statute-book ; 
the mechanic a machine ; ‘the sailor a rope. of the 


ship. 
Wels In this distribution of functions the scholar is 


86 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


the delegated intellect. In the right state he is 
Man _Dhinking. In the degenerate state, when 
than victim of society, he tends to become a mere 


_ thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s 


thinking, 

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the the- 
ory of his office is contained. Him Nature solicits 
with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him 
the past instructs ; him the future invites. Is not 
indeed every man a student, and do not all things 
exist for the student’s behoof? And, finally, is not 
the true scholar the only true master? But the 
old oracle said, “ All things have two handles: be- 

‘ware of the wrong one.” In life, too often, the 
scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privi- 
lege. Let us see him in his school, and consider 
him in reference to the main influences he re- 
celves. 


I. The first in time and the first in importance — 
of the influences upon the mind is that of nature, 
Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, Night and 
her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass 
grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, 
beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all 
men whom this spectacle most engages. He must 
settle its value in his mind. What is nature to 
him? There is never a beginning, there is never 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 87 


an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web 
of God, but always circular power returning into it- 
self. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose 
beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so 
entire, so boundless. Far too as her splendors 
shine, system on system shooting like rays, up- 
ward, downward, without centre, without circum- 
ference, — in the mass and in the particle, Nature 
hastens to render account of herself to the mind. 
Classification begins. To the young mind every! 
thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it i 
finds how to join two things and see in them one. 
nature ; then three, then three thousand ; and so, 
tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes | 
on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, 
discovering roots running under ground whereby 
contrary and remote things cohere and flower out 
from one stem. It presently learns that since the 
dawn of history there has been a constant accumu- 
lation and classifying of facts. But what is classi- 
fication but the perceiving that. these objects are 
not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law 
which is also a law of the human mind? The as- - 
tronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstrac- 
tion of the human mind, is the measure of plan- 
etary motion. The chemist finds proportions and 
intelligible method throughout matter ; and sci. 
ence is nothing but the finding of analogy, iden- 


88 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


tity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul 
sits down before each refractory fact ; one after an- 
other reduces all strange constitutions, all new pow- 
ers, to their class and their law, and goes on for- 
ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the 
outskirts of nature, by insight. 

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bend- 
\ing dome of day, is suggested that he and it pro- 
ceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower ; 
‘relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And 

what is that root? Is not that the soul of his soul? 
A thought too bold; a dream too wild: Yet when 
this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of 
more earthly natures, — when he has learned to 
worship the soul, and to see that the natural philo- 
sophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its 
gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever ex- 
panding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He 
shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, 
answering to it part for part. One is seal and one 
is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. 
Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature 
then becomes to him the measure of his attain- 
ments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so 
much of his own mind does he not yet possess. 
| And, in fine, the ancient precept, “ Know thyself,” 
and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become 


- at last one maxim. 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 89 


II. The next great influence into the spirit of 
the scholar is the mind of the Past,—in whatever 
form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, 
that mind is inscribed. Books are the best type of 
the influence of the past, and perhaps we shall get 
at the truth, — learn the amount of this influence 
more conveniently, — by considering their value 
alone. 

The theory of books is noble. The scholar of, 
the first age received into him the world around; 
brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of | 
his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into/ 
him life; it went out from him truth. It came\ 
to him short-lived actions; it went out from him 
immortal thoughts. It came to him business; it 
went from him poetry. It was dead fact; now, it. 
is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It 
now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Pre-- 
cisely in proportion to the depth of mind from | 
which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does 
it sing. 

Or, I might say, it depends on how far the pro- 
eess had gone, of transmuting life into truth. In 
proportion to the completeness of the distillation, 
duct be. But none is quite perfect. As no air- 
pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, 
go neither can any artist entirely exclude the con- 


90 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


ventional, the local, the perishable from his book, 
or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as 
efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to 
contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each 
age, it is found, must write its own books ; ; or 
‘rather, each generation for the next succeeding. 
The books of an older period will not fit this. 
~ “Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacred- 
ness which attaches to the act of creation, the act 
of thought, is transferred to the record. The poet 
chanting was felt to be a divine man: henceforth 
the chant is divine also. The writer was a just and 
wise spirit: henceforward it 1s settled the book is 
perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into worship 
of his statue. Instantly the book becomes noxious: 
the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted 
mind of the multitude, slow to open to the incur- 
sions of Reason, having once so opened, having 
once received this book, stands upon it, and makes 
an outcry if it is disparaged. Colleges are built 
on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by 
Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start 
wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not 
Rs: their own sight of principles. Meek young 
men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to 
eae the views which Cicero, which Locke, which 
{) Bacon, have given; forgetful that Cicero, Locke, 
} ‘ and Bacon were only young men in libraries when 
‘they wrote these books. 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 91 


Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the | 
bookworm. Hence the book- learned class, who 
value books, as such; not as related to nature and 
the human constitution, but as making a sort of 
Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence | 
the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bib i 
liomaniacs of all degrees. 

Books are the best of things, well eee abused, 
among: the y worst. “What is the right use { ? What 
is the one end which all means go to effect ? They 
are for or nothing but to to Inspire. I had better never 





see a book than to be “warped by its attraction \ 
clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite in- ( 
stead of a system. The one thing 1 in the world, of ' 
value, is the active s ‘soul This every man is en- 
titled ven ; this every man contains within him, 
although in almost all men obstructed, and as yet 
unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth and 
utters truth, or creates. In this action it is genius 3 
not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but 
the sound estate of every man. In its essence it 
is progressive. The book, the college, the school 
of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some 
past utterance of genius. ‘This is good, say they, 
— let us hold by this. They pin me down. They 
look backward and not forward. But_genius looks 
forward : the he eyes of of man are e Setin | his forehead, | 
not in _his “hindhead: man. “hopes: genius “creates, 


a eeaeRiene nities Oe 


92 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, 
the pure efflux of the Deity is not his ;— cinders 
and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There 
are creative manners, there are creative actions, 
and creative words; manners, actions, words, that 
is, indicative of no custom or authority, but spring- 
ing spontaneous from the mind’s own sense of good 
and fair. 

On the other part, instead of being its own seer, 
let it receive from another mind its truth, though 
it were in torrents of light, without periods of soli- 
tude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disser- 
vice is done. Genius is always sufficiently the en- 
emy of genius by over-influence. The literature of 
every nation bears me witness. The English dra- 
matic poets have Shakspearized now for two hun- 
dred years. 

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so 
it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must_ 
not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for 
the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God 
directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted i im 
other men’s transcripts of their readings. But 
~ when the intervals of darkness come, as come they 
must, — when the sun is hid and the stars with- 
draw their shining, — we repair to the lamps 
which were kindled by their ray. to guide our steps 
to the Kast again, where the dawn is. We hear, 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 93 


that we may speak. The Arabian proverb says, “ A 
fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful.” 

It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure 
we derive from the best books. They impress us 
with the conviction that one nature wrote and the 
same reads. We read the verses of one of the 
great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of 
Dryden, with the most modern joy, — with a pleas-. 
ure, I mean, which is: in great part caused by\\ 
the abstraction of all time from their verses. There. 
is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, ¢ 
when this poet, who lived in some past world, two¢ 
or three hundred years ago, says that which lies 2 
close to my own soul, that which I also had well- 
nigh thought and said. But for the evidence thence 
afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the iden- 
tity of all minds, we should suppose some preéstab- 
lished harmony, some foresight of souls that were 
to be, and some preparation of stores for their fu- 
ture wants, like the fact observed in insects, who lay 
up food before death for the young grub they shall 
never see. 

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by 
any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the 
Book. We all know, that as the human body can 
be nourished on any food, though it were_boiled 
erass and the broth of shoes, so the human mind 


ean be fed by any knowledge. And great and 


94 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


heroic men have existed who had almost no other 
information than by the printed page. I only 
would say that it needs a strong head to bear that 
diet. One_must be an inventor to read_well. As 
the proverb says, “‘ He that would bring home the 
wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of 

the Indies.” There is then creative reading as well 
‘as creative writing. When the mind is braced by 
"labor and invention, the page of whatever book 
we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. 
Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense 
of our author is as broad as the world. We then 
see, what is always true, that as the seer’s hour of 
vision is short and rare among heavy days and 
months, so is its record, perchance, the least part 
of his volume. The discerning will read, in his 
Plato or Shakspeare,. only that least part, — only 
the authentic utterances of the oracle ; — all the 
rest he rejects, were it never so many times Plato’s 
and Shakspeare’s. 

Of course there is a portion of reading quite indis- 
pensable to a wise man. History and exact science 
he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like 
manner, have their indispensable office, — to teach 
nese But they: can only aie serve us when 


mas 


eather ‘from fais {ose = of various genius to their 
hospitable halls, and by the concentrated fires, set 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 95 


the hearts of their youth on flame. Thought and 
knowledge are natures in which apparatus and. pre- 
tension avail nothing. Gowns and pecuniary foun- 
dations, though of towns of gold, can never counter- 
vail the least sentence or syllable of wit. Forget this,) 
and our American colleges will recede in their pub{ 
lic importance, whilst they grow richer every ar, 


III. There goes in the world a notion that the 
scholar should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as 
unfit for any handiwork or public labor as a pen- 
knife for an axe. The so-called.“ practical men ” 
sneer at speculative men, as if, because they specu- 
late or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it | 
said that the clergy, — who are always, more uni- | 
versally than si other class, the scholars of their — 
spontaneous conversation of men ‘hd do not ee 
but only a mincing and diluted speech. They are 
often virtually disfranchised ; and indeed there are 
advocates for their celibacy. As far as this is true 
of the studious classes, it is not just and wise. Ac- 
tion is with the teil subordinate, but it is essen- 
tial. Without. it he is not yet _ man. Without it| 
th thought. can_never_ ripen into truth. Whilst the’ 
world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we 
cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, 
but there can be no scholar without the heroic 


96 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


mind. The preamble of thought, the transition 
)through which it passes from the unconscious to the 
conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as 
\[ have lived. Instantly we know whose words are 
\loaded with life, and whose not. 

The world, —this shadow of the soul, or other me, 
lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys 
which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted 
with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding 
tumult. I grasp the hands of those next me, and 
take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, 
taught by an instinct that so shall the dumb abyss 
be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissi- 
pate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of 
my expanding life. So much only of life as I know 
by experience, so much of the wilderness have I 
| vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended 
my being, my dominion. Ido not see how any man 
can afford, for the sake of his nerves and_his nap, 
to spare any action in which he can partake. It is 

| pearls and rubies to his discourse. Drudgery, ca- 


ato» 


| Jamity, exasperation, want, are instructors—in_elo- 
“quence ; and wisdom. The true scholar grudges 
every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of 
power. 
It is the raw material out of which the intellect 
moulds her splendid products. A strange process 


too, this by which experience is converted into 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 97 


thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted into satin. 
The manufacture goes forward at all hours. 

The actions and events of our childhood and youth 
are now matters of calmest observation. They lie 
like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our re- 
cent actions,— with the business which we now have 
in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. 
Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no 
more feel or know it than we feel the feet, or the 
hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is 
yet a part of life,— remains for a time immersed 
in our unconscious life. In some contemplative 
hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, 
to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is 
raised, transfigured ; the corruptible has put on in- 
corruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, 
however base its origin and neighborhood. Ob- 
serve too the impossibility of antedating this act. 
In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is | 
a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, | 
the selfsame thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is! 
an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, 
in our private history, which shall not, sooner or 
later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us 
by soaring from our body into the empyrean. Cra- 
dle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of | 


\ 


boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids | 


and berries, and many another fact that once filled | 


VOL I. 7 


98 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


the whole sky, are gone already; friend and rela- 
tive, profession and party, town and country, nation 
and world, must also soar and sing. 

Of course, he who has put forth his total strength 
in fit actions has the richest return of wisdom. I 
will not shut myself out of this globe of action, and 
transplant an oak into a ftlower-pot, there to hunger 
and pine; nor trust the revenue of some single 
faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much 
like those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood 
by carving shepherds, shepherdesses, and smoking 
Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the 
mountain to find stock, and discovered that they 
had whittled up the last of their pine-trees. Au- 
thors we have, in numbers, who have written out 
their vein, and who, moved by a commendable pru- 
dence, sail for Greece or Palestine, follow the trap- 
per into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to 
replenish their merchantable stock. 

If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar 
would be covetous of action. Life is our diction- 
ary. Years are well spent in country labors; in 
town ; in the insight into trades and manufactures ; 
in frank intercourse with many men and women ; 
in science ; in art; to the one end of mastering in 
all their facts a language by which to illustrate 
and embody our perceptions. I learn immediately 
from any speaker how much he has already lived, 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 99 


through the poverty or the splendor oi his speech. 

Life lies behind us as the quarry from whence we) 
get tiles and copestones for the masonry of to- dey) 
This is the way to learn grammar. Colleges and | 
books only copy the language which the field anil] 
the work-yard made. 

But the final value of action, like that of books, 
and better than books, is that it is a ieitbe\ 
That great principle of Undulation in nature, that )| 
shows itself in the inspiring and~expiring of the || 
breath ; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and flow | 
of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; ) 
and, as yet more deeply ingrained in every atom | 
and every fluid, is known to us under the name of | 
Polarity, — these “fits of easy transmission and | 
reflection,” as Newton called them, —are the law | 
of nature because they are the law of spirit. 

The mind now thinks, now acts, and each fit re- 
produces the other. When the artist has exhausted | 
his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, / 
when thoughts are no longer apprehended and | 
books are a weariness, — he has always the re- 
source to live. Character is higher | than _ intellect, 
Thinking is the function. Living is the function- 
ary. The stream retreats to its source. A great 
soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to 


\ 


' think. Does he lack organ or medium to impart 
his truth? He can still fall back on this elemen- 


ree reer 


age: 


100 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


tal force of living them. This is a total act. 
Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of 
justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of af- 
fection cheer his lowly roof. Those “far from 
fame,’ who dwell and act with him, will feel the 
force of his constitution in the doings and passages 
of the day better than it can be measured by any 
public and designed display. Time shall teach him 


\ that the scholar loses no hour which the man lives. 


Herein he unfolds the sacred germ of his instinct, 
screened from influence. What is lost in seemli- 
ness is gained in strength. Not out of those on 
whom systems of education have exhausted their 
culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old 
or to build the new, but out of unhandselled_sav- 
age nature ; out of terrible Druids: and Berserkers 
come at last Alfred and Shakspeare. 

I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning 
to be said of the dignity and necessity of labor to 
every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the _ 
spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. 
And labor is everywhere welcome ; always we are 
invited to work; only be this limitation observed, 
that a man shall not for the sake of wider activ- 
ity sacrifice any opinion to the popular judgments 
and modes of action. 


I have now spoken of the education of the 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 101 


scholar by nature, by books, and by action. It re- 
mains to say somewhat of his duties. 

They are such as become Man Thinking. They 
may all be comprised in self-trust. The office of 
the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men 
by showing them facts amidst appearances. He 
plies the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of ob-* 
servation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their 
glazed observatories, may catalogue the stars with 
the praise of all men, and the results being splen- 
did and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his pri- 
vate observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous 
stars of the human mind, which as yet no man has 
thought of as such, — watching days and months 
sometimes for a few facts; correcting still his old 
records ; — must relinquish display and immediate 
fame. In the long period of his preparation he 
must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in 
popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who 
shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his 
speech; often forego the living for the dead. 
Worse yet, he must accept, — how often! poverty 
and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of tread- 
ing the old road, accepting the fashions, the educa- 
tion, the religion of society, he takes the cross of 
making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, 
the faint heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss 
of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in 


102 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and 
the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to 
stand to society, and especially to educated society. 
For all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to 
find consolation in exercising the highest functions 
of human nature. He is one who raises himself 
from private considerations and breathes and lives 
on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the 
world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to re- 
sist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to 
barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic 
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious. verse, and 
the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles 
the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn 
hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world 
of actions,—these he shall receive and impart. 
And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her in- 
violable seat pronounces on the passing men and 
events of to-day, — this he shall hear and promul- 
gate. | 

These being his functions, it becomes him to feel 
all confidence in himself, and to defer never to the 
popular cry. He and he only knows the world. 
Lhe world of any moment is the merest appearance. 
Some great decorum, some fetish of a government, 
some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up 
by half mankind and cried down by the other half, 
as if all depended on this particular up or down. 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 103 


The odds are that the whole question is not worth 
the poorest thought which the scholar has lost in 
listening to the controversy. Let him not quit his 
belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient 
and honorable of the earth affirm it to be the crack 
of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe ab- 
straction, let him hold by himself; add observation 
to observation, patient of neglect, patient of re- 
proach, and bide his own time, — happy enough if 
he can satisfy himself alone .that this day he has 
seen something truly. Success treads on every right 
step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to 
tell his brother what he thinks. He then learns 
that in going down into the secrets of his own mind 
he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He 
learns that he who has mastered any law in his pri- 
vate thoughts, is master to that extent of all men 
whose language he speaks, and of all into whose 
language his own can be translated. The poet, in 
utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts 
and recording them, is found to have recorded that 
which men in crowded cities find true for them also. 
The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank 
confessions, his want of knowledge of the persons 
he addresses, until he finds that he is the comple- 
ment of his hearers ;—-that they drink his words 
because he fulfils for them their own nature; the 
deeper he dives into his privatest, secretest pre- 


104 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


sentiment, to his wonder he finds this is the most 
acceptable, most public, and universally true. The 
people delight in it; the better part of every man 
feels, This is my music ; this is myself. 

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended. 
Free should the scholar be, — free and brave. Free 
even to the definition of freedom, “‘ without any 
hindrance that does not arise out of his own consti- 


tution.” 


Brave; for fear is a thing which a scholar 
by his very function puts behind him. Fear always 
springs from ignorance. It is ashame to him if his 
tranquillity, amid dangerous times, arise from the 
presumption that like children and women his is 
a protected class; or if he seek a temporary peace 
by the diversion of his thoughts from politics or 
vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich 
in the flowering bushes, peeping into microscopes, 
and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to keep his 
courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is 
the fear worse. Manlike let him turn and face it. 
Let him look into its eye and search its nature, in- 
spect its origin, — see the whelping of this lion, — 
which lies no great way back; he will then find in 
himself a perfect comprehension of its nature and 
extent; he will have made his hands meet on the 
other side, and can henceforth defy it and pass on 
superior. The world is his who can see through its 
pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind cus- 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 105 


tom, what overgrown error you behold is there only 
by sufferance,— by your sufferance. See it to be a 
lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow. 

Yes, we are the cowed, — we the trustless. It is 
a mischievous notion that we are come late into na- 
ture ; that the world was finished a long time ago. 
As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of 
God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we 
bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They 
adapt themselves to it as they may; but in propor- 
tion as a man has any thing in him divine, the fir- 
mament flows before him and takes his signet and 
form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but 
he who can alter my state of mind. They are the’ 
kings of the world who give the color of their pres- 
ent thought to all nature and all art, and persuade 
men by the cheerful serenity of their carrying the 
matter, that this thing which they do is the apple 
which the ages have desired to pluck, now at last 
ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great 
man makes the great thing. Wherever Macdonald 
sits, , there is the head of the table. Linnzus makes 
botany the most alluring of studies, and wins it from 
the farmer and the herb-woman ; Davy, chemistry ;“ 
and Cuvier, fossils. The day is always his who | 
works in it with serenity and great aims. The un- 
stable estimates of men crowd to him whose mind 
is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the 
Atlantic follow the moon. 


106 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can 
be fathomed, — darker than can be enlightened. 
I might not carry with me the feeling of my au- 
dience in stating my own belief. But I have al- 
ready shown the ground of my hope, in adverting 
to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has 
been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has 
almost lost the light that can lead -him back to his 
prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men 
in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are 
spawn, and are called “the mass” and “ the herd.” 
In a century, in a millennium, one or two men; 
that is to say, one or two approximations to the 
right state of every man. All the rest behold in 
the hero or the poet their own green and crude 
being, — ripened ; yes, and are content to be less, 
so that may attain to its full stature. What a testi- 
mony, full of grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the 
demands of his own nature, by the poor clansman, 
the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his 
chief. The poor and the low find some amends to 
their immense moral capacity, for their acquies- 
}cence in a political and social inferiority. They 
‘are content to be brushed like flies from the path 
of a great person, so that justice shall be done by 
‘him to that common nature which it is the dearest 
desire of all to see enlarged and glorified. They 
sun themselves in the great man’s light, and feel it 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 107 


to be their own element. They cast the dignity of 
man from their downtrod selves upon the shoulders 
of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood 
to make that great heart beat, those giant sinews 
combat and conquer. He lives for us, and we live’ 
in him. 

Men such as they are, very naturally seek money 
or power; and power because it is as good as money, 
—the “spoils,” so called, “of office.” And why 
not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in > 
their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake 
them and they shall quit the false good and leap to 
the true, and leave governments to clerks and desks. 
This revolution is to be wrought by the gradual do- 
mestication of the idea of Culture. The main en- 
terprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the 
upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials 
strewn along the ground. The private life of one} 
man shall be a more illustrious monarchy, more ) 
formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene in ) 
its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in his- 
tory. For a man, rightly viewed, comprehendeth 
the particular natures of all men. Each philoso- 
pher, each bard, each actor has only done for me, 
as by a delegate, what one day I can do for myself. 
The books which once we valued more than the 
apple of the eye, we have quite exhausted. _ What 
is that but saying that we have come up with the 


198 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


point of view which the universal mind took through 
the eyes of one scribe; we have been that man, and 
have passed on. First, one, then another, we drain 
‘all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these sup- 
plies, we crave a better and more abundant food. 
The man has never lived that can feed us ever. 
The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person. 
who shall set a barrier on any one side to this un- 
bounded, unboundable empire. It is one central 
fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, light- 
ens the capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat 
of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards 
of Naples. It is one light which beams out of a 
thousand stars. It is. one soul which animates 
all men. 


But [ have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this ab- 
straction of the Scholar. I ought not to delay 
longer to add what I have to say of nearer reference 
to the time and to this country. 

Historically, there is thought to be a difference 
in the ideas which predominate over successive 
epochs, and there are data for marking the genius 
of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Re- 
flective or Philosophical age. With the views I 
have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the 
mind through all individuals, I do not much dwell 
on these differences. In fact, I believe each indi 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 109 


vidual passes through all three. The boy is a Greek; 
the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective. L deny bee 
not however that a revolution in the leading idea 
may be distinctly enough traced. 

Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. 
Must that needs be evil? We, it seems, are crit- 
ical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts ; we 
cannot enjoy any thing for hankering to know 
whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined with 
eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected 
with Hamlet’s unhappiness, — 


“ Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.” 


It is so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be 
pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we 
should outsee nature and God, and drink truth 
dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary 
class as a mere announcement of the fact that they 
find themselves not in the state of mind of their 
fathers, and regret the coming state as untried ; as 
a boy dreads the water before he has learned that 
he can swim. If there is any period one would de- 
sire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution ; 
when the old and the new stand side by side and 
admit of being compared ; when the energies of all 
men are searched by fear and by hope; when the 
historic glories of the old can be compensated by 
the rich possibilities of the new era? ‘This time, 


/ J 


110 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


like all times, is a very good one, if we but know 
what to do with it. 

I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of 
{the coming days, as they glimmer already through 
jpoetry and art, through philosophy and science, 
through church and state. 


One of these signs is the fact that the same 


// /movement which effected the elevation of what was 


ealled the lowest class in the state, assumed in lit- 
erature a very marked and as benign an aspect. 
Instead of the sublime and beautiful, the near, the 
low, the common, was explored and poetized. That 
‘which had been negligently trodden under foot by 
‘those who were harnessing and provisioning them- 
kelves for long journeys into far countries, is sud- 
\denly found to be richer than all foreign parts. 
The literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, 
the philosophy of the street, the meaning of house- 
hold life, are the topics of the time. It is a great 
stride. It is a sign,—is it not? of new vigor 
when the extremities are made active, when cur- 


'yents of warm life run into the hands and the feet. 


_Lask not for the great, the remote, the romantic: 


PanIIT tere ania 


_what is doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek 


art, or Provengal minstrelsy ; I embrace, the com- 
mon, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, 


| the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you 


may have the antique and future worlds. What 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 111 


would we really know the meaning of? The meal 
in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in 


the street ; the news of the boat; the glance of the. 
eye; the form and the gait of the body ;— show 
me the ultimate reason of these matters ; show me) 
the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause’ 
lurking, as always it does lurk, in these suburbs_ 


and extremities of*nature; let me see every trifle | 


bristling with the polarity that ranges it instantly | 
on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and / 


the ledger referred to the like cause by which light | 


undulates and poets sing ; —and the world lies no / 


longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has \ 


form and order; there is no trifle, there is no puz- / 
zle, but one design unites and animates the far- ) } 


thest pinnacle and the lowest trench: 

This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, 
Burns, Cowper, and, in a newer time, of Goethe, 
Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have 
differently followed and with various success. In 
contrast with their writing, the style of Pope, of 
Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and _ pedantic. 
This writing is blood-warm. Man is surprised to 
find that things near are not less beautiful and 
wondrous than things remote. The near explains 
the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is 
related to all nature. This perception of the worth 
of the vulgar ‘is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in 


112 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


this very thing the most modern of the moderns, 
has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the 
ancients. 

There is one man of genius who has done much 
for this philosophy of life, whose literary value has 
never yet been rightly estimated ; — I mean Eman- 
uel Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men, 
yet writing with the precision of a mathematician, 
he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical 
| Ethics on the popular Christianity of his time. 
Such an attempt of course must have difficulty 
which no genius could surmount. But he saw and 
showed the connection between nature and the af- 
fections of the soul. He pierced the emblematic 
or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangi- 
ble world. Especially did his shade-loving muse 
hover over and interpret the lower parts of nature; 
he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral 
evil to the foul material forms, and has given in 
epical parables a theory of insanity, of beasts, of 
unclean and fearful things. 

Another sign of our times, also marked by an 
analogous political movement, is the new impor- 
tance given to the single person. Every thing that 
tends to insulate the individual, — to surround him 
with barriers of natural respect, so that each man 
shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with 
man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state, 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 113 


— tends to true union as well as greatness. “I 
learned,” said the melancholy Pestalozzi, “that no 
man in God’s wide sii is either willing or able to 
help any other man.” Help must come from the 
bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must 
take up into himself all the ability of the time, all 
the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the 
future. He must be an university of knowledges. 
If there be one lesson more than another which 
should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, } 
the man is all; in yourself is the law of all na. \ 
ture, and you know not yet how a globule of sap | 
ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Rea. 
son ; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare 
all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confi. 
dence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by _, 
all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, _/ 
to the_American Scholar. We have listened too 
long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit 
of the American freeman is already suspected to 
be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private ava- 
rice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The 
scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See al- 
ready the tragic consequence. The mind of this 
country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon it- 
self. There is no work for any but the decorons 
and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest 


promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated 
VOL. I. 8 


114 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 


by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars 
of God, find the earth below not in unison with 
these, but are hindered from action by the disgust 
which the principles on which business is man- 
aged inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, 
some of them suicides. What is the remedy ? 
They did not yet see, and thousands of young men 
as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the 
career do not yet see, that if the single man plant 
himself indomitably on his instincts, and there 
abide, the huge world will come round to him. 
’Patience, — patience ; with the shades of all the 
‘good and great for company; and for solace the 
‘perspective of your own infinite life; and for work 
the study and the communication of principles, 
the making those instincts prevalent, the conver- 
sion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace 
in the world, not to be an unit ;— not to be reck- 
oned one character ; — not to yield that peculiar 
fruit which each man was created to bear, but to 
be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the 
thousand, of the party, the section, to which we be- 
long ; and our opinion predicted geographically, as 
the north, or the south? Not. so, brothers and 
friends, — please God, ours shall not be so. We 
will walk on our own feet; we will work with our 
own hands; we will speak our own minds. The 
study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, 


THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR. 115 


for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread 
of man and the love of man shall be a wall of de- 
fence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of 
men will for the first time exist, because each be- 
lieves himself inspired by the Divine Soul which 
also inspires all men. 


‘niga soit en ' go Fal Sona 


= i 
; 

| i v5 eae 
tin Peele Ci Sak thee yet ged aye 4 oe ‘ , 


i 
4 


<Meoge ro Rise eit ieee eae aM iw 8 : ; ae 
Te ot abies ae. 


= 


* 


sh ack eee Sb bh eset an 
| MO fy, eerstaiasl pee 





AN ADDRESS 


DELIVERED BEFORE THE SENIOR CLASS IN DIVINITY COLLEGE, 
CAMBRIDGE, SUNDAY EVENING, JULY 15, 1838. 


eax ttm 


eiet td 
(a0 
; rie 





ADDRESS. 





In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury’ 
to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the | 
buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and 
gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, 
and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of- 
Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom | 
to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the 
transparent darkness the stars pour their almost 
spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young. 
child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night 
bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his. 
eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of 
nature was never displayed more happily. The | 
corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all 
creatures, and the never-broken silence with which | 
the old bounty goes forward has not yielded yet — 
one word of explanation. One is constrained to 
respect the perfection of this world in which our 
senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invi- 
tation from every property it gives to every faculty 
of man! In its fruitful soils; in its navigable sea; 


oo 


120 ADDRESS. 


in its mountains of metal and stone; in its forests 
of all woods; in its animals ; in its chemical ingre- 
dients ; in the powers and path of light, heat, at- 
traction and life, it is well worth the pith and 
heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The 
planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astrono- 
mers, the builders of cities, and the captains, his- 
tory delights to honor. 

But when the mind opens and reveals the laws 
which traverse the universe and make things what 
they are, then shrinks the great world at once into 


_a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What 


-am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a 


curiosity new-kindled, but never to be quenched. 
Behold these outrunning laws, which our imperfect 
apprehension can see tend this way and that, but 
not come full circle. Behold these infinite rela- 
tions, so like, so unlike; many, yet one. I would 
study, I would know, I would admire forever. 
These works of thought have been the entertain- 


' ments of the human spirit in all ages. 


A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty 
appears to man when his heart and mind open to 


_the sentiment of virtue. Then he is instructed in 


what is above him. He learns that his being is 
without bound ; that to the good, to the perfect, he 
is born, low as he now lies in evil and. weakness. 
That which he venerates is still his own, though he 


ADDRESS. 121 


has not realized it yet. He ought. He knows the 
sense of that grand word, though his analysis fails 
to render account of it. When in innocency or 
when by intellectual perception he attains to say, — 
“T love the Right; Truth is beautiful within and 
without forevermore. Virtue, I am thine; save 
me; use me; thee will I serve, day and night, in 
great, in small, that I may be not virtuous, but vir- 
tue ;”’ — then is the end of the creation answered, 
and God is well pleased. z 

The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and de- 
light in the presence of certain divine laws. It per- 
ceives that this homely game of life we play, covers, 
under what seem foolish details, principles that as- 
tonish. The child amidst his baubles is learning 
the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force ; 
and in the game of human life, love, fear, justice, 
appetite, man, and God, interact. These laws re- 
fuse to be adequately stated. They will not be 
written out on paper, or spoken by the tongue. 
They elude our persevering thought; yet we read 
them hourly in each other’s faces, in each other’s ac- 
tions, in our own remorse. The moral traits which 
are all globed into every virtuous act and thought, 
—~in speech we must sever, and describe or suggest 
by painful enumeration of many particulars. Yet, 
as this sentiment is the essence of all religion, let 
‘ne guide your eye to the precise objects of the sen- 


122 ADDRESS. 


timent, by an enumeration of some of those classes 
of facts in which this element is conspicuous. 

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an in- 
sight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. 
These laws execute themselves. They are out of - 
time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance. 
Thus in the soul of man there is a justice whose 
retributions are instant and entire. He who does_ 
a good deed is instantly ennobled. He who does 
a mean deed is by the action itself contracted. He 
who puts: off impurity, thereby puts on purity. fis 
a man is at heart just, then in so far is he God; 
the safety of God, the immortality of God, the 
majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. 
If a man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, 
and goes out of acquaintance with his own being. 
A man in the view of absolute goodness, adores, 
with total humility. Every step so downward, is a 
step upward. The man who renounces himself, 
comes to himself. 

See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh 
everywhere, righting wrongs, correcting appear- 
ances, and bringing up facts to a harmony with 
thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the 
senses, is at last as sure as in the soul. By ita 
-man is made the Providence to himself, dispensing 
, good to his goodness, and evil to his sin. Character 
\| is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never 


\ 


ADDRESS. 123 


impoverish ; murder will speak out of stone walls. 
The least admixture of a lie,— for example, the/ 
taint of vanity, any attempt to make a good i impres- ) 
sion, a favorable appearance, — will instantly vi-| 
tiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all na-| 
ture and all spirits help you with unexpected) 
furtherance. Speak the truth, and all things alive | 
or brute are vouchers, and. the very roots of the 
grass underground there do seem to stir and move 
to bear you witness. See again the perfection of 
the Law as it applies itself to the affections, and 
becomes the law of society. As we are, so we as- 
sociate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the 
vile, by affinity, the vile... Thus of their own voli- 
tion, souls proceed into heaven, into hell. 

These facts have always suggested to man the 
sublime creed that the world is not the product of 
manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and 
that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of 
the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and what- 
ever opposes that will is everywhere balked and 
baffled, because things are made so, and not other- 
wise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, 
not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation 
of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. 
Benevolence is absolute and real. So much bene- | 
volence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For 
all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is 


124 ADDRESS. 


differently named love, justice, temperance, in its 
different applications, just as the ocean receives 
different names on the several shores which it 
' washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, 
and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man 
seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength 
of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, 
he bereaves himself of power, or auxiliaries; his 
being shrinks out of all remote channels, he be- 
comes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute 
badness is absolute death. 

The perception of this law of laws awakens in 
the mind a sentiment which we call the religious 
sentiment, and which makes our highest happiness. 
Wonderful is its power to charm and to com- 
mand. It isa mountain air. It is the embalmer 
of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine 
and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sub- 
lime, and the silent song of the stars isit. By it 
is the universe made safe and habitable, not by 
science or power. Thought may work cold and in- 
transitive in things, and find no end or unity; but 
the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, 
gives and is the assurance that Law is sovereign 
over all natures; and the worlds, time, space, eter- 
nity, do seem to break out into joy. | 

This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is 
the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable. 


ADDRESS. 125 


Through it, the soul first knows itself. It corrects 
the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks to 
be great by following the great, and hopes to de- 
rive advantages from another, — by showing the 
fountain of all good to be in himself, .and that he, 
equally with every man, is an inlet into the deeps 
of Reason. When he says, “ I ought ;” when love 
warms him; when he chooses, warned from on 
high, the good and great deed; then, deep melodies 
wander through his soul from Supreme Wisdom. 
— Then he can worship, and be enlarged by his 
worship; for he can never go behind this senti- 
‘ment. In the sublimest flights of the soul, recti-| 
tude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown. 
This sentiment lies at the foundation of society, 
and successively creates all forms of worship. The 
principle of veneration never dies out. Man fallen 
into supetstition, into sensuality, is never quite 
without the visions of the moral sentiment. In like 
manner, all the expressions of this sentiment are 
sacred and permanent in proportion to their purity. 
The expressions of this sentiment affect us more 
than all other compositions. The sentences of the 
oldest time, which ejaculate this piety, are still 
fresh and fragrant. This thought dwelled always 
deepest in the minds of men in the devoyt and con- 
templative East; not alone in Palestine, where it 
reached its purest expression, but in Egypt, in 


a 


ere 


126 ADDRESS. 


Persia, in India, in China. Europe has always 
owed to oriental genius its divine impulses. What 
these holy bards said, all sane men found agreeable 
and true. And the unique impression of Jesus 
upon mankind, whose name is not so much written 
as ploughed into the history of this world, is proof 


of the subtle virtue of this infusion. 


Meantime, whilst the doors of the temple stand 
open, night and day, before every man, and the 
oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by 
one stern condition; this, namely; it is an intui- 
tion. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly 
speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that 
I can receive from another soul. What he an- 
nounces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on 
his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can 
accept nothing. On the contrary, the absence of 
this primary faith is the presence of degradation. 
As is the flood so is the ebb. Let this faith depart, 
and the very words it spake and the things it made 
become false and hurtful. Then falls the church, 
the state, art, letters, life. The doctrine of the 
divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects 
and dwarfs the constitution. Once man was all; 
now he is an appendage, a nuisance. And _ be- 
cause the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot wholly 
be got rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perver- 
sion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or 


ADDRESS. 127 


two persons, aud denied to all the rest, and denied 
with fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost; the/ 
base doctrine of the majority of voices usurps the \ 
place of the doctrine of the soul. Miracles, proph- | 
ecy, poetry, the ideal life, the holy life, exist as an- | 
cient history merely; they are not in the belief, | 
nor in the aspiration of society; but, when sug-/ 
gested, seem ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful 
as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, 
and man becomes near-sighted, and can only at- 
tend to what addresses the senses. 

These general views, which, whilst they are gen- 
eral, none will contest, find abundant illustration in 
the history of religion, and especially in the history 
of the Christian church. In that, all of us have 
had our birth and nurture. The truth contained 
in that, you, my young friends, are now setting 
forth to teach. As the Cultus, or established wor- 
ship of the civilized world, it has great historical 
interest for us. Of its blessed words, which have 
been the consolation of humanity, you need not 
that I should speak. I shall endeavor to discharge 
my duty to you on this occasion, by pointing out 
two errors in its administration, which daily appear 
more gross from the point of view we have just 
now taken. 

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of proph- 
ets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the 


128 ADDRESS. 


soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with 
its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there, 
Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of 
man. One man was true to what is in you and 
me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, 
and evermore goes forth anew to take possession 
of his World. He said, in this jubilee of sub- 
lime emotion, ‘I am divine. Through me, God 
/ acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, 
see me; or see thee, when thou also thinkest as I 
now think.’ But what a distortion did his doctrine 
and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and 
the following ages! There is no doctrine of the 
Reason which will bear to be taught by the Under- 
standing. The understanding caught this high 
chant from the poet’s lips, and said, in the next 
age, ‘This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. 
I will kill you, if you say he was a man.’ The 
idioms of his language and the figures of his 
rhetoric have usurped the place of his truth; and 
churches are not built on his principles, but on his 
tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the po- 
etic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He 
spoke of miracles; for he felt that man’s life was a 
miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that 
this daily miracle shines as the character ascends. 
But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian 
churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. 


ADDRESS. 129 


It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling 
rain. 

He felt respect for Moses and the prophets, but 
no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial reve- 
lations to the hour and the man that now is; to the 
eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true 
man. Having seen that the law in us is command- 
ing, he would not suffer it to be commanded. 
Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he declared 
it was God. Thus is he, as I think, the only soul 
in history who has appreciated the worth of man. 

1. In this ‘point of view we become sensible of 
the first defect of historical Christianity. Histori- 
ical Christianity has fallen into the error that 
corrupts all attempts to communicate religion. <As 
it appears to us, and as it has appeared for ages, 
it is not the doctrine of the soul, but an exag- 
geration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. 
It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggera- 
tion about the person of Jesus. The soul knows 
no persons. It invites every man to expand to 
the full circle of the universe, and will have no- 
preferences but those of spontaneous love. But by 
this eastern monarchy of a Christianity, which in- 
dolence and fear have built, the friend of man is 
made the injurer of man. The manner in which 
his name is surrounded with expressions which 


were once sallies of admiration and love, but are 
VOL. I. 9 


130 ADDRESS. 


now petrified into official titles, kills all generous 
sympathy and liking. All who hear me, feel that 
the language that describes Christ to Europe and 
America is not the style of friendship and enthusi- 
asm to a good and noble heart, but is appropriated 
and formal, —paints a demigod, as the Orientals 
or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo. 
Accept the injurious impositions of our early cat- 
echetical instruction, and even honesty and self- 
denial were but splendid sins, if they did not wear 
the Christian name. One would rather be 


“A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,” 


than to be defrauded of his manly right in coming into 
nature and finding not names and places, not land 
and professions, but even virtue and truth foreclosed 
and monopolized. You shall not be a man even. 
You shall not own the world; you shall not dare 
and live after the infinite Law that is in you, and 
in company with the infinite Beauty which heaven 
and earth reflect to you in all lovely forms; but 
you must subordinate your nature to Christ’s na- 
ture; you must accept our interpretations, and take 
his portrait as the vulgar draw it. 

That is always best which gives me to myself. 
The sublime is excited in me by the great stoical 
doctrine, Obey thyself. That which shows God in 
me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, 


ADDRESS. 181 


makes me a wart anda wen. There is no longer a 
necessary reason for my being. Already the long 
shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I 
shall decease forever. 

The divine bards are the friends of my virtue, 
of my intellect, of my strength. They admonish 
me that the gleams which flash across my mind are 
not mine, but God’s; that they had the like, and 
were not disobedient to the heavenly vision. So I 
love them. Noble provocations go out from them, 
inviting me to resist evil; to subdue the world ; 
and to Be. And thus, by his holy thoughts, Jesus 
serves us, and thus only. To aim to convert a man 
by miracles, is a profanation of the soul. A true 
conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be 
made by the reception of beautiful sentiments. It 
is true that a great and rich soul, like his, falling 
among the simple, does so preponderate, that, as 
his did, it names the world. The world seems to 
them to exist for him, and they have not yet drunk 
so deeply of his sense as to see that only by coming 
again to themselves, or to God in themselves, can 
they grow forevermore. It is a low benefit to give 
me something ; it is a high benefit to enable me to 
do somewhat of myself. The time is coming when \ 
all men will see that the gift of God to the soul is| 
not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, | 


but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine| 


132 ADDRESS. 


and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be 
and to grow. 

The injustice of the vulgar tone of preaching is 
not less flagrant to Jesus than to the souls which it 
profanes. The preachers do not see that they make 
his gospel not glad, and shear him of the locks of 
beauty and the attributes of heaven. When I see 


{a majestic Epaminondas, or Washington; when I 


| _see among my contemporaries a true orator, an up- 
|| right judge, a dear friend; when I vibrate to the 
_\melody and fancy of a poem; I see beauty that is 
‘to be desired. And so lovely, and with yet more 


/entire consent of my human being, sounds in my 


——__ 


ear the severe music of the bards that have sung of 
the true God in all ages. Now do not degrade the 
life and dialogues of Christ out of the cirele of this 
charm, by insulation and peculiarity. Let them lie 
as they befel, alive and warm, part of human life 
and of the landscape and of the cheerful day. 

2. The second defect of the traditionary and 
limited way of using the mind of Christ, is a conse- 
quence of the first; this, namely ; that_the Moral 


f ‘N ature, that Law of laws whose revelations intro- 
j “duce “greatness, — yea, God himself, — inte the 


open soul, is not_explored as the fountain of the es- 


_ tablished teaching in_society. Men have come to 


speak of the revelation as somewhat long ago given 
‘and done, as if God were dead. The injury te 


ADDRESS. 133 


faith throttles the preacher; and the goodliest of 
institutions becomes an uncertain and inarticu- 
late voice. 

It is very certain that it is the effect of conversa- 
tion with the beauty of the soul, to beget a desire 
and need to impart to others the same knowledge 
and love. If utterance is denied, the thought lies 
like a burden on the man. Always the seer is aj. 
sayer. Somehow his dream is told ; somehow hej. 
publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pen-/) 
cil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, some-) 


5 


times in towers and aisles of granite, his soul’s) 


; 


worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of in-) 
definite music; but clearest and most permanent, 
in words. 

The man enamored of this excellency becomes its 
priest or poet. The office is coeval with the world. 
But observe the condition, the spiritual limitation 
of the office. The spirit only can teach. Not any 
profane man, not any sensual, not any liar, not any ( 
slave can teach, but only he can give, who has; he | 
only can create, who is. The man on whom the | 
soul descends, through whom the soul speaks, alone ( 
ean teach. Courage, piety, love, wisdom, can teach; \ 
and every man can open his door to these angels, } 
and they shall bring him the gift of tongues. But / 
the man who aims to speak as books enable, as syn- 


¢ 

( 

ods use, as the fashion guides, and as interest com- ) 
mands, babbles. Let him hush, 


134 ADDRESS. 


To this holy office you propose to devote your: 
selves. I wish you may feel your call in throbs of 
Mlesire and hope. ‘The office is the first in the 
world. It is of that reality that it cannot suffer 
the deduction of any falsehood. And it is my duty 
to say to you that the need was never greater of 
new revelation than now. From the views I have 
already expressed, you will infer the sad convic- 
tion, which I share, I believe, with numbers, of the 
universal decay and now almost death of faith in 
society. The soul is not preached. The Church 
seems to totter to its fall, almost all life extinct. 
On this occasion, any complaisance would be crim- 
| inal which told you, whose hope and commission it 
\is to preach the faith of Christ, that the faith of 
Christ is preached. 

It is time that this ill-suppressed murmur of all 
thoughtful men against the famine of our churches; 
— this moaning of the heart because it is bereaved 
of the consolation, the hope, the grandeur that 
come alone out of the culture of the moral nature, 
—should be heard through the sleep of indolence, 
and over the din of routine. This great and per- 
petual office of the preacher is not discharged. 

< Preaching is the expression of the moral sentiment 
in application to the duties of life. In how many 
|| churches, by how many prophets, tell me, is man 
made sensible that he is an infinite Soul; that the 


ADDRESS. 135 


earth and heavens are passing into his mind ; that), 
he is drinking forever the soul of God? Where 
now sounds the persuasion, that by its very melody | 
imparadises my heart, and so affirms its own origin | 
in heaven? Where shall I hear words such as in > 
elder ages drew men to leave all and follow, — | 
father and mother, house and land, wife and child ? | 
Where shall I hear these august laws of moral be- 
ing so pronounced as to fill my ear, and I feel en- 
nobled by the offer of my uttermost action and pas- 
sion? The test of the true faith, certainly, should 
be its power to charm and command the soul, as 
the laws of nature control the activity of the hands, 
— so commanding that we find pleasure and honor 
in obeying. The faith should blend with the light 
of rising and of setting suns, with the flying cloud, 
the singing bird, and the breath of flowers. But 
now the priest’s Sabbath has lost the splendor of 
nature ; it is unlovely; we are glad when it is done; 
we can make, we do make, even sitting in our 
pews, a far better, holier, sweeter, for ourselves. 
Whenever the pulpit is usurped by a formalist, 
then is the worshipper defrauded and disconsolate. 
We shrink as soon as the prayers begin, which do 
not uplift, but smite and offend us. We are fain 
to wrap our cloaks about us, and secure, as best we 
ean, a solitude that hears not. I onee heard a 
preacher who sorely tempted me to say I would go 


136 ADDRESS. 


to church no more. Men go, thought I, where 
they are wont to go, else had no soul entered the 
temple in the afternoon. A snow-storm was fall- 
ing around us. ‘The snow-storm was real, the 
preacher merely spectral, and the eye felt the sad 
contrast in looking at him, and then out of the 
window behind him into the beautiful meteor of 
the snow. He had lived in vain. He had no one 
‘word intimating that he had laughed or wept, 
‘was married or in love, had been commended, or 
cheated, or chagrined. If he had ever lived and 
‘acted, we were none the wiser for it. The capital 
secret of his profession, namely, to convert life 
into truth, he had not learned. Not one fact in 
all his experience had he yet imported into his doc- 
trine. This man had ploughed and planted and 
talked and bought and sold; he had read books; 
he had eaten and drunken; his head aches, his 
heart throbs; he smiles and suffers; yet was there 
not a surmise, a hint, in all the discourse, that he 
had ever lived at all. Nota line did he draw out 
of real history. The true preacher can be known 
by this, that he deals out to the people his life, — 
life passed through the fire of thought. But of the 
bad preacher, it could not be told from his sermon 
what age of the world he fell in; whether he had a 
father or a child ; whether he was a freeholder or 
a pauper; whether he was a citizen or a country- 


ADDRESS. 137 


man; or any other fact of his biography. It\ 
seemed strange that the people should come to 
church. It seemed as if their houses were very un- 
entertaining, that they should prefer this thought- 
less clamor. It shows that there is a commanding 
attraction in the moral sentiment, that can lend a 
faint tint of hght to dulness and ignorance coming 
in its name and place. The good hearer is sure 
he has been tcuched sometimes; is sure there is 
somewhat to be reached, and some word that can 
reach it. When he listens to these vain words, he 
comforts himself by their relation to his remem- 
brance of better hours, and so they clatter and echo 
unchallenged. 

I am not ignorant that when we preach unworth- 
ily, it is not always quite in vain. There is a good 
ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out 
of very indifferent nutriment. There is poetic 
truth concealed in all the common-places of prayer 
and of sermons, and though foolishly spoken, they 
may be wisely heard; for each is some select ex- 
pression that broke out in a moment of piety from 
some stricken or jubilant soul, and its excellency 
made it remembered. The prayers and even the 
dogmas of our church are like the zodiac of Den- 
derah and the astronomical monuments of the Hin- 
doos, wholly insulated from anything now extant in 
the life and business of the people. They mark the 


138 ADDRESS. 


height to which the waters once rose. But this do- 
eility is a check upon the mischief from the good 
and devout. In a large portion of the community, 
the religious service gives rise to quite other thoughts 
and emotions. We need not chide the negligent 
servant. We are struck with pity, rather, at the 
swift retribution of his sloth. ‘Alas for the un- 
happy man that is called to stand in the pulpit, and 
not give bread of life) Everything that befalls, ac- 
cuses him. Would he ask contributions for the 
missions, foreign or domestic? Instantly his face 
is suffused with shame, to propose to his parish that 
‘they should send money a hundred or a thousand 
miles, to furnish such poor fare as they have at 
home and would do well to go the hundred or the 
thousand miles to escape. Would he urge people 
to a godly way of lhving;—and can he ask a 
fellow-creature to come to Sabbath meetings, when 
he and they all know what is the poor uttermost 
they can hope for therein? Will he invite them 
privately to the Lord’s Supper? He dares not. If 
no heart warm this rite, the hollow, dry, creaking 
formality is too plain than that he can face a man 
of wit and energy and put the invitation without 
terror. In the street, what has he to say to the 
bold village blasphemer? The village blasphemer 
sees fear in the face, form, and gait of the min- 
ister. | 


ADDRESS. 139 


Let me not taint the sincerity of this plea by any\ 
oversight of the claims of good men. I know and | 
honor the purity and strict conscience of numbers. 
of the clergy. What life the public worship re-! 
tains, it owes to the scattered company of pious 
men, who minister here and there in the churches, 
and who, sometimes accepting with too great ten- 
derness the tenet of the elders, have not accepted | 
from others, but from their own heart, the genuine 
impulses of virtue, and so still command our love 
and awe, to the sanctity of character. Moreover, 
the exceptions are not so much to be found in a few 
eminent preachers, as in the better hours, the truer 
inspirations of all, —nay, in the sincere moments of ' 
every man. But, with whatever exception, it is 
still true that tradition characterizes the preaching 
of this country; that it comes out of the memory, 
and not out of the soul; that it aims at what is 
usual, and not at what is necessary and eternal ; 
that thus historical Christianity destroys the power 
of preaching, by withdrawing it from the explo- 
ration of the moral nature of man; where the sub- 
lime is, where are the resources of astonishment and 
power. What a cruel injustice it is to that Law, 
the joy of the whole earth, which alone can make 
thought dear and rich; that Law whose fatal sure- 
ness the astronomical orbits poorly emulate ;— that 
it is travestied and depreciated, that it is behooted 


140 ADDRESS. 


and behowled, and not a trait, not a word of it ar- 
ticulated. The pulpit in losing sight of this Law, 
loses its reason, and gropes after it knows not what. 
And for want of this culture the soul of the com- 
munity is sick and faithless. It wants nothing so 
_/much as a stern, high, stoical, Christian diseipline, 
| to make it know itself and the divinity that speaks 
through it. Now man is ashamed of himself; he 
skulks and sneaks through the world, to be tolerated, 
to be pitied, and scarcely in a thousand years does 
)any man dare go be wise and good, and so draw af- 
| ter him the tears and blessings of his kind. 
Certainly there have been periods when, from the 
inactivity of the intellect on certain truths, a greater 
faith was possible in names and persons. The Puri- 
tans in England and America found in the Christ 
of the Catholic Church and in the dogmas inherited 
from Rome, scope for their austere piety and their 
longings for civil freedom. But their creed is pass- 
ing away, and none arises in its room. I think no 
man can go with his thoughts about him into one 
of our churches, without feeling that what hold the 
public worship had on men is gone, or going. It 
has lost its grasp on the affection of the good and 
the fear of the bad. In the country, neighborhoods, 
half parishes are signing off, to use the local term. 
It is already beginning to indicate character and 
religion to withdraw from the religious meetings. 


ADDRESS. 141 


[ have heard a devout person, who prized the Sab- 
bath, say in bitterness of heart, ‘On Sundays, it 
seems wicked to go to church.” And the motive 
that holds the best there is now only a hope and 
a waiting. What was once a mere circumstance, 
that the best and the worst men in the parish, the 
poor and the rich, the learned and the ignorant, 
young and old, should meet one day as fellows in 
one house, in sign of an equal right in the soul, has 
come to be a paramount motive for going thither. 
My friends, in these two errors, I think, I find the 
causes of a decaying church and a wasting unbelief. 
And what greater calamity can fall upon a nation 
than the loss of worship? Then all things go to de>\ 
cay. Genius leaves the temple to haunt the sen- 
ate or the market. Literature becomes frivolous. \_, 
Science is cold. The eye of youth is not lighted by [ 
the hope of other worlds, and age is without honor. 
Society lives to trifles, and when men die we do not 
mention them. F 
And now, my brothers, you will ask, What in 
these desponding days can be done by us? The 
remedy is already declared in the ground of our 
complaint of the Church. We have contrasted the 
Church with the Soul. — Tn the soul then let the re-. 
demption be sought. Wherever a man comes, there 
comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a 
man comes, all books are legible, all things trans- 


142 ADDRESS. 


parent, all religions are forms. He is religious. 
Man is the wonderworker. He is seen amid mir- 
acles. All men bless and curse. He saith yea and 
nay, only. The stationariness of religion; the as- 
sumption that the age of inspiration is past, that 
the Bible is closed ; the fear of degrading the char- 
acter of Jesus by representing him as a man ; —in- 
dicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our 
theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show 
us that_God_is, not was; that He speaketh, not 
spake. The true Christianity, —a faith like Christ’s 
in the infinitude of man, —is lost. None believeth 
in the soul of man, but only in some man or person 
old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. 
_All men goin flocks to this saint or that poet, 
avoiding the God who seeth in secret. They can- 
not see in secret ; they love to be blind in public. 
They think society wiser than their soul, and know 
not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the 
whole world. See how nations and races flit by on 
_ the sea of time and leave no ripple to tell where 
| they floated or sunk, and one good soul shall make 
\ the name of Moses, or of Zeno, or of Zoroaster, rev- 
\Jerend forever. None assayeth the stern ambition 
to be the Self of the nation and of nature, but each 
would be an easy secondary to some Christian 
scheme, or sectarian connection, or some eminent 
man. (Once leave your own knowledge of God, 


ADDRESS. 148 


your own sentiment, and take secondary knowledge, 
as St. Paul’s, or George Fox’s, er Swedenborg’s, and 
you get wide from God with every year this sec- 
ondary form lasts, and if, as now, for centuries, — 
the chasm yawns to that breadth, that men can 
scarcely be convinced there is in them anything 
divine. 

Let me aan ditiah you, first of all, te go alone; 
to refuse the good models, even those which are 
sacred in the imagination of men, and dare to love 
God without mediator or veil. Friends enough you 
shall find who will hold up to your emulation Wes- 
leys and Oberlins, Saints and Prophets. Thank 
God for these good men, but say, ‘I also otis Se man.’ 
Imitation cannot go above its model. “The imitator 
dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inven- 
tor did it because it was natural to him, and so in 
him it has a charm. In the imitator something else 
is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own 
beauty, to come short of another man’s. 

Yourself a newborn bard of the Holy Ghost, ) 
cast behind you all conformity, and acquaint men/ 
at first hand with Deity. Look to it first and only, 
that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, 
are nothing to you, —are not bandages over your eyes,) 
that you cannot see, — but live with the privilege, 
of the immeasurable mind Not too anxious to visit 
periodically all families aud each family in your 


144 ADDRESS. 


parish connection, — when you meet one of these 
men or women, be to them a divine man; be to 
them thought and virtue ; let their timid aspirations 
find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts 
be genially tempted out in your atmosphere ; let 
their doubts know that you have doubted, and their 
wonder feel that you have wondered. By trusting 
your own heart, you shall gain more confidence in 
other men. For all our penny-wisdom, for all our 
soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be 
doubted that all men have sublime thoughts ; that 
all men value the few real hours of life; they love 
to be heard; they love to be caught up into the 
vision of principles. We mark with light in the 
(memory the few interviews we have had, in the 
) dreary years of routine and of sin, with souls that 
/ )made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought ; 
that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to 
be what we inly were. Discharge to men the 
priestly office, and, present or absent, you shall be 


\. followed with their love as by an angel. 


~ And, to this end, let us not aim at common de- 
grees of merit. Can we not leave, to such as love 
it, the virtue that glitters for the commendation of 
society, and ourselves pierce the deep solitudes of 
absolute ability and worth? We easily come up 
to the standard of goodness in society. Society’s 
praise can be cheaply secured, and almost all men 


ADDRESS. 145 


are content with those easy merits; but the instant 
effect of conversing with God will be to put them 
away. ‘There are persons who are not actors, not 
speakers, but influences ; persons too great for fame, 
for display ; who disdain eloquence ; to whom all 
we call art and artist, seems too nearly allied to 
show and by-ends, to the exaggeration of the finite 
and selfish, and loss of the universal. The orators, 
the poets, the commanders encroach on us only as 
fair women do, by our allowance and homage. 
Slight them by preoccupation of mind, slight them, 
as you can well afford to do, by high and universal 
aims, and they instantly feel that you have right, 
and that it is in lower places that they must shine. 
They also feel your right; for they with you are 
open to the influx of the all-knowing Spirit, which 
annihilates before its broad noon the little shades 
and gradations of intelligence in the compositions 
we call wiser and wisest. 

In such high communion let us study the grand 
strokes of rectitude: a bold benevolence, an inde- 
pendence of friends, so that not the unjust wishes 
of those who love us shall impair our freedom, but 
we shall resist for truth’s sake the freest flow of 
kindness, and appeal to sympathies far in ad- 
vance; and, — what is the highest form in which 
we know this beautiful element, — a certain solid- 


ity of merit, that has nothing to do with opinion, 
VOL. I. 10 


146 ADDRESS. 


and which is so essentially and manifestly virtue, 
that it is taken for granted that the right, the 
_ brave, the generous step will be taken by it, and 
nobody thinks of commending it. You would com- 
pliment a coxcomb doing a good act, but you would 
not praise an angel. | The silence that accepts 
merit as the most natural thing in the world, is 
the highest applause. | Such souls, when they ap- 
pear, are the Imperial Guard of Virtue, the per- 
petual reserve, the dictators of fortune. One needs 
not praise their courage, —-they are the heart and 
soul of nature. O my friends, there_are resources. 
im us on which we have not drawn. There are 
men who rise refreshed on hearing a threat ; men 
to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyzes 
the majority, —demanding not the faculties of pru- 
dence and thrift, but comprehension, immovable- 
ness, the readiness of sacrifice, —comes graceful 
and beloved as a bride. Napoleon said of Mas- 
sena, that he was not himself until the battle began 
to go against him; then, when the dead began to 
fall in ranks around him, awoke his powers of 
combination, and he put on terror and victory as 
a robe. So it isin rugged crises, in unweariable 
endurance, and in aims which put sympathy out of 
question, that the angel is shown. But these are 
heights that we can scarce remember and look up 
to without contrition and shame. Let us thank 
God that such things exist. 


ADDRESS. 147 


And now let us do what we can to rekindle the 
smouldering, nigh quenched fire on the altar. The 
evils of the church that now is are manifest. The 
question returns, What shall we do? I confess, 
all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with 


new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith 
arth _ 


makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own 
Nn 

forms. All ‘attempts to contrive a system are as 
cold as the new worship introduced by the French 
to the goddess of Reason, —to-day, pasteboard and 
filigree, and ending to-morrow in madness and 


murder. Rather let_the b breath of new life be 


breathed by y you. through the £ forms already. existe. 
ing. For if once you are alive, you shall find they 
shall become plastic and new. The remedy to 
their deformity is first, soul, and second, soul, and 
evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms one 
pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify. Two in- 
estimable _advantages Christianity has given us; 
first ‘the, e Sabbath, the jubilee of the whole world, 
whose eae. ge welcome alike into the closet of 
the philosopher, into the garret of toil, and into 
prison-cells, and everywhere suggests, even to the 
vile, the dignity of spiritual being. Let it stand 
forevermore, a temple, which new love, new faith, 
new sight shall restore to more than its first splen- 
dor to mankind. And secondly, the institution of 


preaching, —the speech of man to men, — essen- 


148 ADDRESS. 


tially the most flexible of all organs, of all forms. 
What hinders that now, everywhere, in pulpits, in 
lecture-rooms, in houses, in fields, wherever the 
invitation of men or your own occasions lead you, 
you speak the very truth, as your life and con- 
science teach it, and cheer the waiting, fainting 
hearts of men with new hope and new revelation? 
I look for the hour when that supreme Beauty 
which ravished the souls of those eastern men, and 
chiefly of those Hebrews, and through their lips 
spoke oracles to all time, shall speak in the West 
also. The Hebrew and Greek Scriptures contain 
' immortal sentences, that have been bread of life to 
millions. But they have no epical integrity; are 
fragmentary; are not shown in their order to the 
intellect. I look for the new Teacher that shall 
follow so far those shining laws that he shall see 
them come full circle; shall see their rounding 
complete grace; shall see the world to be the mir- 
ror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of 
gravitation with purity of heart; and shall show 
\ that the Ought, that Duty, is is_one thing with Sci- 
fence, » with Beauty, and with “Joy RS ee coal es . 


Sei cases 


\ 


LITERARY ETHICS. 


AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE LITERARY SOCIETIES OF 
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, JULY 24, 1888. 


4S es 
i Py ‘ , 





ORATION. 





GENTLEMEN, 

The invitation to address you this day, with which 
you have honored me, was a call so welcome that I 
made haste to obey it. A summons to celebrate 
with scholars a literary festival, is so alluring to me 
as to overcome the doubts I might well entertain of 
my ability to bring you any thought worthy of your 
attention. I have reached the middle age of man ; 
yet I believe I am not less glad or sanguine at the 
meeting of scholars, than when, a boy, I first saw 
the graduates of my own College assembled at their 
anniversary. Neither years nor books have yet 
availed to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me, 
that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, 
the excellency of his country, the happiest of men. 
His duties lead him directly into the holy ground 
where other men’s aspirations only point. His suc- 
cesses are occasions of the purest joy to all men. 
Eyes is he to the blind; feet is he to the lame. His 
failures, if he is worthy, are inlets to higher advan- 
tages. And because the scholar by every thought 
he thinks extends his dominion into the general 


152 7 LITERARY ETHICS. 


mind of men, he is not one, but many. The few 
scholars in each country, whose genius I know, 
seem to me not individuals, but societies; and when 
events occur of great import, I count over these rep- 
resentatives of opinion, whom they will affect, as 
if I were counting nations. And even if his results 
were incommunicable ; if they abode in his own 
spirit ; the intellect hath somewhat so sacred in its 
possessions that the fact of his existence and pur- 
suits would be a happy omen. 

Meantime I know that a very different estimate 
of the scholar’s profession prevails in this country, 
and the importunity, with which society presses its 
claim upon young men, tends to pervert the views 
of the youth in respect to the culture of the intel- 
lect. Hence the historical failure, on which Europe 
and America have so freely commented. This 
country has not fulfilled what seemed the reason- 
able expectation of mankind. Men looked, when 
all feudal straps and bandages were snapped asun- 
der, that nature, too long the mother of dwarfs, 
should reimburse itself by a brood of Titans, who 
should laugh and leap in the continent, and run up 
the mountains of the West with the errand of ge- 
nius and of love. But the mark of American merit 
in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in 
eloquence, seems to be a certain grace without 
grandeur, and itself not new but derivative, a vase 


LITERARY ETGHICS. 163 


of fair outline, but empty, — which whoso sees 
may fill with what wit and character is in him, but 
which does not, like the charged cloud, overflow 
with terrible beauty, and emit lightnings on all 
beholders. 

I will not lose myself in the desultory questions, 
what are the limitations, and what the causes of 
the fact. It suffices me to say, in general, that the 
diffidence of mankind in the soul has crept over the 
American mind; that men here, as elsewhere, are 
indisposed to innovation, and prefer any antiquity, 
any usage, any livery productive of ease or profit, 
to the unproductive service of thought. 

Yet in every sane hour the service of thought ap- 
pears reasonable, the despotism of the senses insane. 
The scholar may lose himself in schools, in words, 
and become a pedant; but when he comprehends 
his duties he above all men is a realist, and con- 
verses with things. For the scholar is the student 


with what emphasis it accosts the soul of man, such 
is the worth, such the call of the scholar. 

The want of the times and. the propriety of this 
anniversary concur to draw attention to the doc-/ 
trine of spas ts Ethics. What I have to say on | 
that doctrine distributes itself under the topics of 
the resources, the subject, and the discipline of the 


of the world; and of what worth the world is, h 


scholar. 


154 LITERARY ETHICS. 


I. The resources of the scholar are proportioned 
to his confidence in the attributes of the Intellect. 
The resources of the scholar are co-extensive with 
nature and truth, yet can never be his unless claimed 
by him with an equal greatness of mind. He can- 
not know them until he has beheld with awe the in- 
finitude and impersonality of the intellectual power. 
When he has seen that it is not his, nor any man’s, 
but that it is the soul which made the world, and 
that it is all accessible to him, he will know that he, 
as its minister, may rightfully hold all things sub- 
ordinate and answerable to it. A divine pilgrim 
in nature, all things attend his steps. Over him 
stream the flying constellations; over him streams 
Time, as they, scarcely divided into months and 
years. He inhales the year as a vapor: its fragrant 
mid-summer breath, its sparkling January heaven. 
And so pass into his mind, in bright transfigura- 
tion, the grand events of history, to take a new 
order and seale from him. He is the world; and 
the epochs and heroes of chronology are pictorial 
images, in which his thoughts are told. There is 
no event but sprung somewhere from the soul of 
man; and therefore there is none but the soul of 
man can interpret. Every presentiment of the 
mind is executed somewhere in a gigantic fact. 
What else is Greece, Rome, England, France, St. 
Helena? What else are churches, literatures, and 


LITERARY ETHICS. 155 


empires? The new man must feel that he is new, 
and has not come into the world mortgaged to the 
opinions and usages of Europe, and Asia, and Egypt. 
The sense of spiritual independence is like the lovely 
varnish of the dew, whereby the old, hard, peaked 
earth and its old self-same productions are made 
new every morning, and shining with the last touch 
of the artist’s hand. A false humility, a complais- 
ance to reigning schools or to the wisdom of antiq- 
uity, must not defraud me of supreme possession 
of this hour. If any person have less love of liberty 
and less jealousy to guard his integrity, shall he 
therefore dictate to you and me? Say to such doc- 
tors, We are thankful to you, as we are to history, © 
to the pyramids, and the authors ; but now our day 
is come; we have been born out of the eternal 
silence; and now will we live, — live for ourselves, 
— and not as the pall-bearers of a funeral, but as 
the upholders and creators of our age; and neither 
Greece nor Rome, nor the three Unities of Aristotle, 
nor the three Kings of Cologne, nor the College of | 
the Sorbonne, nor the Edinburgh Review is to com-: 
mand any longer. Now that we are here we will 
put our own interpretation on things, and our own 
things for interpretation. Please himself with com- 
plaisance who will, — for me, things must take my 
seale, not I theirs. I will say with the warlike 
king, “ God gave me this crown, and the whole 
world shall not take it away.” 


156 LITERARY ETHICS. 


_The whole value of history, of biography, is to 
increase my self-trust, by demonstrating what man 
can be and do. This is the moral of the Plu- 
tarchs, the Cudworths, the Tennemanns, who give 
us the story of men or of opinions. Any history 
of philosophy fortifies my faith, by showing me 
that what high dogmas I had supposed were the — 
rare and late fruit of a cumulative culture, and 
only now possible to some recent Kant or Fichte, 
—were the prompt improvisations of the earliest 
inquirers; of Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Xeno- 
phanes. In view of these students, the soul seems 
to whisper, ‘There is a better way than this indo- 
lent learning of another. Leave me alone; do not 
teach me out of Leibnitz or Schelling, and I shall 
find it all out myself.’ 

Still more do we owe to biography the fortifica- 
tion of our hope. If you would know the power 
of character, see how much you would impoverish 
the world if you could take clean out of history the 
lives of Milton, Shakspeare, and Plato, — these 
three, and cause them not to be. See you not how 
much less the power of man would be? I console 
myself in the poverty of my thoughts, in the pau- 
city of great men, in the malignity and dulness of 
the nations, by falling back on these sublime recol- 
lections, and seeing what the prolific soul could 
beget on actual nature ;— seeing that Plato was, 


LITERARY ETHICS. 157 


and Shakspeare, and Milton, — three irrefragable 
facts. Then I dare; I also will essay to be. The 
humblest, the most hopeless, in view of these radi- 
ant facts, may now theorize and hope. In spite of 
all the rueful abortions that squeak and gibber in 
the street, in spite of slumber and guilt, in spite of 
the army, the bar-room, and the jail, have been 
these glorious manifestations of the mind; and I 
will thank my great brothers so truly for the ad- 
monition of their being, as to endeavor also to be 
just and brave, to aspire and to speak. Plotinus 
too, and Spinoza, and the immortal bards of philos- 
ophy, —that which they have written out with pa- 
tient courage, makes me bold. No more will I dis- 
miss, with haste, the visions which flash and spar- 
kle across my sky; but observe them, approach 
them, domesticate them, brood on them, and draw 
out of the past, genuine life for the present hour. 
To feel the full value of these lives, as occasions ) 
of hope and provocation, you must come to know/ 
that each admirable genius is but a successful ) 
diver in that sea whose floor of pearls is all your | 
own. The impoverishing philosophy of ages has 
laid stress on the distinctions of the individual, and 
not on the universal attributes of man. The youth, 
intoxicated with his admiration of a hero, fails to 
see that it is only a projection of his own soul 
which he admires. In solitude, in a remote vil. 


158 LITERARY ETHICS. 


lage, the ardent youth loiters and mourns. With 
inflamed eye, in this sleeping wilderness, he has 
read the story of the Emperor Charles the Fifth, 
until his fancy has brought home to the surround- 
ing woods, the faint roar of cannonades in the 
Milanese, and marches in Germany. He is curi- 
ous concerning that man’s day. What filled it? 
the crowded orders, the stern decisions, the for- 
eign despatches, the Castilian etiquette? The soul 
answers — Behold his day here! In the sighing of 
these woods, in the quiet of these gray fields, in 
the cool breeze that sings out of these northern 
mountains ; in the workmen, the boys, the maid- 
ens you meet, —in the hopes of the morning, the 
ennui of noon, and sauntering of the afternoon ; in 
the disquieting comparisons; in the regrets at want 
of vigor; in the great idea and the puny execu- 
tion ; — behold Charles the Fifth’s day; another, 
yet the same ; behold Chatham’s, Hampden’s, Bay- 
ard’s, Alfred’s, Scipio’s, Pericles’s day, — day of 
all that are born of women. The difference of cir- 
cumstance is merely costume. I am tasting “the 
lself-same life, — its sweetness, its greatness, its 
| pain, which I so admire in other men. Do not 
foolishly ask of the inscrutable, obliterated past, 
what it cannot tell, — the details of that nature, of 
that day, called Byron, or Burke ; — but ask it of 
the enveloping Now; the more quaintly you in- 


LITERARY ETHICS. 159 


spect its evanescent beauties, its wonderful details, 
its spiritual causes, its astounding whole, — so 
much the more you master the biography of this 
hero, and that, and every hero. Be lord of a day, 
through wisdom and justice, and you can put up 
your history books. 

An intimation of these broad rights is familiar 
in the sense of injury which men feel in the as- 
sumption of any man to limit their possible pro- 
gress. We resent all criticism which denies us any- 
thing that lies in our line of advance. Say to the 
man of letters that he cannot paint a Transfigura- 
tion, or build a steamboat, or be a grand-marshal, — 
and he will not seem to himself depreciated. But 
deny to him any quality of literary or metaphysical 
power, and he is piqued. Concede to him genius, 
which is asort of Stoical plenwm annulling the 
comparative, and he is content; but concede him 
talents never so rare, denying him genius, and he 
is aggrieved. What does this mean? Why sim- 
ply that the soul has assurance, by instincts and 
presentiments, of a// power in the direction of its 
ray, as well as of the ied skills it has already 
acquired. 

In order to a knowledge of the resources of the 
scholar, we must not rest in the use of slender ac- 
complishments, — of faculties to do this and that 
other feat with words; but we must pay our vows 


{60 LITERARY ETHICS. 


to the highest power, and pass, if it be possible, by 
assiduous love and watching, into the visions of ab- 
solute truth. The growth of the intellect is strictly 
analogous in all individuals. It is larger reception. 
Able men, in general, have good dispositions, and 
a respect for justice ; because an able man is noth- 
ing else than a good, free, vascular organization, 
whereinto the universal spirit freely flows; so that 
his fund of justice is not only vast, but infinite. 
All men, in the abstract, are just and good; what 
hinders them in the particular is the momentary 
predominance of the finite and individual over the 
general truth. The condition of our incarnation 
in a private self seems to be a perpetual tendency 
to prefer the private law, to obey the private im- 
pulse, to the exclusion of the law of universal be- 
ing. The hero is great by means of the predomi- 
nance of the universal nature; he has only to open 
his mouth, and it speaks; he has only to be forced 
to act, and it acts. All men catch the word, or 
embrace the deed, with the heart, for it is verily 
theirs as much as his; but in them this disease of 
an excess of organization cheats them of equal is- 
sues. Nothing is more simple than greatness ; in- 
| deed, to be simple is to be great. The vision of ge- 
<nius comes by renouncing the too officious activity 
>of the understanding, and giving leave and amplest 
(2 privilege to the spontaneous sentiment. Out of this 


LITERARY ETHICS. 161 


must all that is alive and genial in thought go. 
Men grind and grind in the mill of a truism, and 
nothing comes out but what was put in. But the 
moment they desert the tradition for a spontaneous 
thought, then poetry, wit, hope, virtue, learning, an- 
ecdote, all flock to their aid. Observe the phenom- 
enon of extempore debate. A man of cultivated 
mind but reserved habits, sitting silent, admires the 
miracle of free, impassioned, picturesque speech, 
in the man addressing an assembly; — a state of 
being and power how unlike his own! Presently 
his own emotion rises to his lips, and overflows 
in speech. He must also rise and say somewhat. 
Once embarked, once having overcome the novelty 
of the situation, he finds it just as easy and 
natural to speak, — to speak with thoughts, with 
pictures, with rhythmical balance of sentences, — 
as it was to sit silent; for it needs not to do, but 
to suffer; he only adjusts himself to the free 
spirit which gladly utters itself through him; and 
motion is as easy as rest. 


II. I pass now to consider the task offered to 
the intellect of this country. The view I have 
taken of the resources of the scholar, presupposes a 
subject as broad. We do not seem to have imag- 
ined its riches. We have not heeded the invitation 
it holds out. To be as good a scholar as English- 


VOL. I. 11 


162 LITERARY ETHICS. 


men are, to have as much learning as our contem- 
poraries, to have written a book that is read, sat- 
isfies us. We assume that all thought is already 
long ago adequately set down in books, — all imag- 
inations in poems ; and what we say we only throw 
in as confirmatory of this supposed complete body 
of literature. A very shallow assumption. Say 
rather all literature is yet to be written. Poetry 
has scarce chanted_its first song. The perpetual 

 Heliadixik on eofandenen to us, is, ° The world is new, 
untried. Do not believe the past. I give you the 
universe a virgin to-day.’ 

By Latin and English poetry we were born and 
bred in an oratorio of praises of nature, — flowers, 
birds, mountains, sun, and moon ; — yet the natur- 
alist of this hour find that he knows nothing, by all 
their poems, of any of these fine things; that he has 
conversed with the mere surface and show of them 
all; and of their essence, or of their history, know- 
ing nothing. Further inquiry will discover that 
nobody, — that not these chanting poets themselves, 
knew any thing sincere of these handsome natures 
they so commended ; that they contented themselves 
with the passing chirp of a bird, that they saw one 
or two mornings, and listlessly looked at sunsets, 
and repeated idly these few glimpses in their song. 
But go into the forest, you shall find all new and 

_ undescribed. The honking of the wild geese fly- 


LITERARY ETHICS. 163 


ing by night; the thin note of the companionable 
titmouse in the winter day; the fall of swarms of 
flies, in autumn, from combats high in the air, pat-\ 
tering down on the leaves like rain ; the angry hiss 
of the wood-birds ; the pine throwing out its pollen} 
for the benefit of the next century ; the turpentine) 
exuding from the tree; — and indeed any vegeta-| 
tion, any animation, any and all, are alike unat-| 
tempted. The man who stands on the seashore, or 
who rambles in the woods, seems to be the first man 
that ever stood on the shore, or entered a grove, his 
sensations and his world are so novel and strange. 
Whilst I read the poets, I think that nothing new) 
can be said about morning and evening. But when. 
I see the daybreak I am not reminded of these! 
Homeric, or Shakspearian, or Miltonic, or Chauce-’ 
rian pictures. No, but I feel perhaps the pain of 
an alien world; a world not yet subdued by the 
thought; or I am cheered by the moist, warm, glit- 
tering, budding, melodious hour, that takes down 
the narrow walls of my soul, and extends its life 
and pulsation to the very horizon. Zhaé is morn- 
ing, to cease for a bright hour to be a prisoner of 
this sickly body, and to become as large as nature. 
The noonday darkness of the American forest, 
the deep, echoing, aboriginal woods, where the liv- | 
ing columns of the oak and fir tower up from the| 
ruins of the trees of the last millennium; where,’ 


164 LITERARY ETHICS. 


from year to year, the eagle and the crow see no 
intruder ; the pines, bearded with savage moss, yet 
touched with grace by the violets at their feet; the 
broad, cold lowland which forms its coat of vapor 
with the stillness of subterranean crystallization ; 
and where the traveller, amid the repulsive plants 
that are native in the swamp, thinks with pleasing 
terror of the distant town; this beauty, — haggard 
and desert beauty, which the sun and the moon, the 
snow and the rain, repaint and vary, has never 
been recorded by art, yet is not indifferent to any 
passenger. All men are poets at heart. They 
(serve nature for bread, but her loveliness overcomes 
them sometimes. What mean these journeys to 
Niagara; these pilgrims to the White Hills? Men 
believe in the adaptations of utility, always: in the 
mountains, they may believe in the adaptations of 
the eye. Undoubtedly the changes of geology have 
a relation to the prosperous sprouting of the corn 
and peas in my kitchen garden; but not less is 
there a relation of beauty between my soul and the 
dim crags of Agiocochook up there in the clouds. 
Every man, when this is told, hearkens with joy, 
and yet his own conversation with nature is still un- 
sung. 

Is it otherwise with civil history? Is it not the 
lesson of our experience that every man, were life 
long enough, would write history for himself? 


LITERARY ETHICS. 165 


What else do these volumes of extracts and manu- 
script commentaries, that every scholar writes, in- 
dicate? Greek history is one thing to me; another 
to you. Since the birth of Niebuhr and Wolf, Ro-} 
man and Greek History have been written anew. | 
Since Carlyle wrote French History, we see that no 
history that we have is safe, but a new classifier 
shall give it new and more philosophical arrange- 
ment. Thucydides, Livy, have only provided ma- 
terials. The moment a man of genius pronounces 
the name of the Pelasgi, of Athens, of the Etrurian, 
of the Roman people, we see their state under a 
new aspect. As in poetry and history, so in the 
other departments. There are few masters or none. — 
Religion is yet to be settled on its fast foundations 
in the breast of man; and politics, and philosophy, 
and letters, and art. As yet we have nothing but | 
tendency and indication. 

This starting, this warping of the best literary 
works from the adamant of nature, is especially ob- 
servable in philosophy. Let it take what tone of 
pretension it will, to this complexion must it come, 
at last. Take for example the French Eclecticism, 
which Cousin esteems so conclusive; there is an op- 
tical illusion in it. It avows great pretensions. It 
looks as if they had all truth, in taking all the sys- 
tems, and had nothing to do but to sift and wash 
and strain, and the gold and diamonds would re. 


166 LITERARY ETHICS. 


main in the last colander. But, Truth is such a fly- 
\away, such a slyboots, so untransportable and un- 
barrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as 
(light. Shut the shutters never so quick to keep 
all the light in, it is all in vain; it is gone before 
you can cry, Hold. And so it happens with our 
philosophy. Translate, collate, distil all the sys- 
tems, it steads you nothing; for truth will not be, 
compelled in any mechanical manner. But the first 
observation you make, in the sincere act of your 
nature, though on the veriest trifle, may open a new 
view of nature and of man, that, like a menstruum, 
shall dissolve all theories in it ; shall take up Greece, 
Rome, Stoicism, Eclecticism, and what not, as mere 
data and food for analysis, and dispose of your 
world-containing system as a very little unit. A 
profound thought, anywhere, classifies all things : 
a profound thought will lift Olympus. The book 
of philosophy is only a fact, and no more inspiring 
fact than another, and no less; but a wise man will 
never esteem it anything final and transcending. 
(Go and talk with a man of genius, and the first 
‘word he utters, sets all your so-called knowledge 
‘afloat and at large. Then Plato, Bacon, Kant, and 
the Eclectic Cousin condescend instantly to be men 
and mere facts. 
I by no means aim in these remarks to disparage 
the merit of these or of any existing compositions ; 


LITERARY ETHICS. 167 


I only say that any particular portraiture does not 
in any manner exclude or forestall a new attempt, 
' but, when considered by the soul, warps and 
shrinks away. The inundation of the spirit sweeps 
away before it all our little architecture of wit and 
memory, as straws and straw-huts before the tor- 
vent. Works of the intellect are great only by, 
comparison with each other ; Ivanhoe and Waver- | 
ley compared with Castle Radcliffe and the Por-_ 
ter novels; but nothing is great, — not mighty 
Homer and Milton, — beside the infinite Reason. | 
It carries them away as a flood. They are as a/ 
sleep. | 

Thus is Justice done to each generation and in- 
dividual, — wisdom teaching man that he shall not 
hate, or fear, or mimic his ancestors; that he shall 
not bewail himself, as if the world was old, and 
thought was spent, and he was born into the dotage 
of things; for, by virtue of the Deity, thought re- 
news itself inexhaustibly every day, and the thing 
whereon it shines, though it were dust and sand, is 
a new subject with countless relations. 


III. Having thus spoken of the resources and 
the subject of the scholar, out of the same faith 
proceeds also the rule of his ambition and life. 
Let him know that the world is his, but he must 
possess it by putting himself into harmony with the 


168 LITERARY ETHICS. 


constitution of things. He must be a solitary, la- 
borious, modest, and charitable soul. 

He must embrace solitude as a bride. He must 
have his glees and his glooms alone. His own esti- 
mate must be measure enough, his own praise re- 
ward enough for him. And why must the student 
be solitary and silent? ‘That he may become ac- 


/quainted with his thoughts. If he pines in a lonely 


\ place, hankering for the crowd, for display, he is’ 


/ not in the lonely place ; his heart is in the market ; 
) he does not see; he does not hear; he does not 
‘think. But go cherish your soul; expel compan- 
ions ; set your habits to a hfe of solitude ; then will 
( the faculties rise fair and full within, like forest 
jtrees and field flowers; you will have results, 
which, when you meet your fellow-men, you can 
/ communicate, and they will gladly receive. Do not 


go into solitude only that you may presently come 
into public. Such solitude denies itself; is public 
and stale. The public can get public experience, 
but they wish the scholar to replace to them those 
private, sincere, divine experiences of which they 
have been defrauded by dwelling in the street. It 
is the noble, manlike, just thought, which is the 
superiority demanded of you, and not crowds but 
solitude confers this elevation. Not insulation of 
place, but independence of spirit is essential, and 
it is only as the garden, the cottage, the forest, and 


LITERARY ETHICS. 169 


the rock, are a sort of mechanical aids to this, that 
they are of value. Think alone, and all places are 
friendly and sacred. The poets who have lived in 
cities have been hermits still. Inspiration makes 
solitude anywhere. Pindar, Raphael, Angelo, 
Dryden, De Staél, dwell in crowds it may be, but 
the instant thought comes the crowd grows dim to 
their eye; their eye fixes on the horizon, on va- 
cant space ; they forget the by-standers ; they spurn 
personal relations ; they deal with abstractions, 
with verities, with ideas. They are alone with the 
mind. 

Of course I would not have any superstition 
about solitude. Let the youth study the uses of: 
solitude and of society. Let him use both, not) 
serve either. The reason why an ingenious soul! 
shuns society, is to the end of finding society.| 
It repudiates the false, out of love of the true.) 
You can very soon learn all that Society can teach) 
you 4 ‘For « one while.” “Tits: ‘foolish sh_routine, an _indefi-| 
ae a more wre than : a few ¢ can. ~ Then ac- | 
cept the hint of shame, of. spiritual emptiness and 
waste which true nature gives you, and retire and}, 
hide; lock the door; shut the shutters; then wel-) 
come falls the imprisoning rain, — dear hermitage \ 
of nature. Re-collect the spirits. Have solitary } 
prayer and praise. Digest and correct the past 


170 LITERARY ETHICS. 


experience ; and blend it with the new and divine 
life. 

You will pardon me, Gentlemen, if I say I think 
that we have need of a more rigorous scholastic 
rule; such an asceticism, I mean, as only the har- 
dihood and devotion of the scholar himself can en- 
force. We live in the sun and on the surface, — 
a thin, plausible, superficial existence, and talk of 
muse and prophet, of art and creation. But out of 
our shallow and frivolous way of life, how can 
greatness ever grow? Come now, let us go and be 
dumb. Let us sit with our hands on our mouths, 
a long, austere, Pythagorean lustrum. Let us live 
in corners, and do chores, and suffer, and weep, 
and drudge, with eyes and hearts that love the 
Lord. Silence, seclusion, austerity, may pierce 
deep into the grandeur and secret of our being, 
and so diving, bring up out of secular darkness 
the sublimities of the moral constitution. How 
mean to go blazing, a gaudy butterfly, in fashion- 
able or political saloons, the fool of society, the 
fool of notoriety, a topic for newspapers, a piece of 
the street, and forfeiting the real prerogative of 
_ the russet coat, the privacy, and the true and warm 
heart of the citizen ! 

Fatal to the man of letters, fatal to man, is the 
lust of display, the seeming that unmakes our 
being. A mistake of the main end to which they 


LITERARY ETHICS. 171 


labor is incident to literary men, who, dealing with 
the organ of language,—the subtlest, strongest, 
and longest-lived of man’s creations, and only fitly 
used as the weapon of thought and of justice, — 
learn to enjoy the pride of playing with this splen- 
did engine, but rob it of its almightiness by failing 
to work with it. Extricating themselves from the 
tasks of the world, the world revenges itself by 
exposing, at every turn, the folly of these incom- 
plete, pedantic, useless, ghostly creatures. The! 
scholar will feel that the richest romance, the 
noblest fiction that was ever woven, the heart and \,, 
soul of beauty, lies enclosed in human life.  It- 
self of surpassing value, it is also the richest ma- 
terial for his creations. How shall he know its se- 
erets of tenderness, of terror, of will, and of fate? 
How can he catch and keep the strain of upper 
music that peals from it? Its laws are concealed 
under the details of daily action. All action is an 
experiment upon them. He must bear his share 
of the common load. He must work with men in 
houses, and not with their names in books. His 
needs, appetites, talents, affections, accomplish- | 
ments, are keys that open to him the beautiful 
museum of human life. Why should he read it as 
an Arabian tale, and not know, in his own beating 
bosom, its sweet and smart? Out of love and 
hatred, out of earnings, and borrowings, and lend- 


172 LITERARY ETHICS. 


/ ings, and losses; out of sickness and pain; out of 
| wooing and worshipping; out of travelling, and 
| voting, and watching, and caring; out of disgrace 
| and contempt, comes our tuition in the serene and 
| beautiful laws. Let him not slur his lesson; let 
him learn it by heart. Let him endeavor exactly, 
bravely, and cheerfully, to solve the problem of 
that life which is set before him. And this by 
punctual action, and not by promises or dreams. 
Believing, as in God, in the presence and favor 
of the grandest influences, let him deserve that 
favor, and learn how to receive and use it, by fidel- 
ity also to the lower observances. 

This lesson is taught with emphasis in the life of 
the great actor of this age, and affords the expla- 
nation of his success. Bonaparte represents truly 
a great recent revolution, which we in this country, 
please God, shall carry to its farthest consumma- 
tion. Not the least instructive passage in modern 
history seems to me a trait of Napoleon exhibited 
to the English when he became their prisoner. 
On coming on board the Bellerophon, a file of 
English soldiers drawn up on deck gave him 
a military salute. Napoleon observed that their 
manner of handling their arms differed from the 
French exercise, and, putting aside the guns of 
those nearest him, walked up to a soldier, took his 
gun, and himself went through the motion in 


LITERARY ETHICS. iS 


the French mode. The English officers and men 
looked on with astonishment, and inquired if such 
familiarity was usual with the Emperor. 

In this instance, as always, that man, with what- 
ever defects or vices, represented performance in 
lieu of pretension. Feudalism and Orientalism 
had long enough thought it majestic to do nothing ; 
the modern majesty consists in work. He be- 
longed to a class fast growing in the world, who 
think that what a man can do is his greatest orna- 
ment, and that he always consults his dignity by 
doing it. He was not a believer in luck; he had 
a faith, ike sight, in the application of means to 
ends. Means to ends, is the motto of all his be- 
havior. He believed that the great captains of 
antiquity performed their exploits only by correct 
combinations, and by justly comparing the relation 
between means and consequences, efforts and ob- 
stacles. The vulgar call good fortune that which 
really is produced by the calculations of genius. 
But Napoleon, thus faithful to facts, had also this 
crowning merit, that whilst he believed in number 
and weight, and omitted no part of prudence, he 
believed also in the freedom and quite incalculable 
force of the soul. A man of infinite caution, he 
neglected never the least particular of preparation, 
of patient adaptation; yet nevertheless he had a 
sublime confidence, as in his all, in the sallies of 


174 LITERARY ETHICS. 


the courage, and the faith in his destiny, which, at 
the right moment, repaired all losses, and demol- 
ished cavalry, infantry, king, and kaisar, as with 
irresistible thunderbolts. As they say the bough 
of the tree has the character of the leaf, and the 
whole tree of the bough, so, it is curious to remark, 
Bonaparte’s army partook of this double strength 
of the captain; for, whilst strictly supplied in all 
its appointments, and everything expected from 
the valor and discipline of every platoon, in flank 
and centre, yet always remained his total trust in 
the prodigious revolutions of fortune which his 
reserved Imperial Guard were capable of working, 
if, in all else, the day was lost. Here he was sub- 
lime. He no longer calculated the chance of the 
cannon ball. He was faithful to tactics to the 
uttermost, —and when all tactics had come to an 
end then he dilated and availed himself of the 
mighty saltations of the most formidable soldiers 
in nature. 

Let the scholar appreciate this combination of 
gifts, which, applied to better purpose, make true 
wisdom. He is a revealer of things. Let him first 
learn the things. Let him not, too eager to grasp 
some badge of reward, omit the work to be done. 
Let him know that though the success of the 
market is in the reward, true success is the doing ; 
that, in the private obedience to his mind; in the 


LITERARY ETHICS. 175 


sedulous inquiry, day after day, year after year, to 
know how the thing stands; in the use of all 
means, and most in the reverence of the humble 
commerce and humble needs of life, — to hearken 
what they'say, and so, by mutual reaction of thought 
and life, to make thought solid, and life wise; and 
in a contempt for the gabble of to-day’s opinions 
the secret of the world is to be learned, and the 
skill truly to unfold it is acquired. Or, rather, is 
it not, that, by this discipline, the usurpation of the 
senses is overcome, and the lower faculties of man 
are subdued to docility; through which as an un- 
obstructed channel the soul now easily and gladly 
flows ? 

The good scholar will not refuse to bear the yoke\ 
in his youth; to know, if he can, the uttermost se- 


a 


2 | 


eret of toil and endurance ; to make his own hands 
acquainted with the soil by which he is fed, and 
the sweat that goes before comfort and luxury. 


a 


Let him pay his tithe and serve the world as a true \ 


' 


ane 


and noble man ; never forgetting to worship the im- 


mortal divinities who whisper to the poet and make 
him the utterer of melodies that pierce the ear of 
eternal time. If he have this twofold goodness, — 
the drill and the inspiration, — then he has health ; 
then he is a whole, and not a fragment; and the 
perfection of his endowment will appear in his com- 
positions. Indeed, this twofold merit character- 


176 LITERARY ETHICS. 


) izes ever the productions of great masters. The 
man of genius should occupy the whole space be- 
tween God or pure mind and the multitude of un- 
educated men. He must draw from the infinite 
_ Reason, on one side; and he must penetrate into 
the heart and sense of the crowd, on the other. 
From one, he must draw his strength ; to the other, 
he must owe his aim. The one yokes him to the 
_ real; the other, to the apparent. At one pole is 
Reason; at the other, Common Sense. If he be 
defective at either extreme of the scale, his philos- 
_ ophy will seem low and utilitarian, or it will appear 
. too vague and indefinite for the uses of life. 
The student, as we all along insist, is great only 
by being passive to the superincumbent spirit. Let 
this faith then dictate all his action. Snares and 
bribes abound to mislead him; let him be true 
nevertheless. His success has its perils too. There 
is somewhat inconvenient and injurious in his posi- 
tion. They whom his thoughts have entertained or 
inflamed, seek him before yet they have learned 
the hard conditions of thought. They seek him, 
that he may turn his lamp on the dark riddles 
whose solution they think is inscribed on the walls 
of their being. They find that he is a poor, igno- 
rant man, in a white-seamed, rusty coat, like them- 
selves, nowise emitting a continuous stream of 
light, but now and then a jet of luminous thought 


LITERARY ETHICS. 117 


followed by total darkness; moreover, that he can- 
not make of his infrequent illumination a portable 
taper to carry whither he would, and explain now 
this dark riddle, now that. Sorrow ensues. The 
scholar regrets to damp the hope of ingenuous 
boys ; and the youth has lost a star out of his new 
flaming firmament. Hence the temptation to the 
scholar to mystify, to hear the question, to sit upon 
it, to make an answer of words in lack of the oracle 
of things. Not the less let him be cold and true, 
and wait in patience, knowing that truth can make 
even silence eloquent and memorable. Truth shall 
be “policy enough for him. Let him open his 
breast to all honest i inquiry, and be an artist supe- 
rior to tricks of art. Show frankly as a saint would 
do, your experience, methods, tools, and means. 
Welcome all comers to the freest use of the same. 
And out of this superior frankness and charity 
you shall learn higher secrets of your nature, 
which gods will bend and aid you to communicate. 

If, with a high trust, he can thus submit himself, 
he will find that ample returns are poured into his 
bosom out of what seemed hours of obstruction 
and loss. Let him not grieve too much on account 
of unfit associates. When he sees how much 
thought he owes to the disagreeable antagonism 
of various persons who pass and cross him, he can 
easily think that in a society of perfect sympathy, 


VOL. I, 12 


178 LITERARY ETHICS. 


no word, no act, no record, would be. He will 
learn that it is not much matter what he reads, 
what he does. Be a scholar, and he shall have the 
scholar’s part of everything. As in the counting- 
/room the merchant cares little whether the cargo 
Ybe hides or barilla; the transaction, a letter of 
\eredit or a transfer of stocks; be it what it may, 
‘his commission comes gently out of it; so you shall 
‘get your lesson out of the hour, and the object, 
whether it be a concentrated or a wasteful employ- 
ment, even in reading a dull book, or working off 
| a stint of mechanical day-labor which your necessi- 
‘/ties or the necessities of others impose. 


Gentlemen, I have ventured to offer you these 
considerations upon the scholar’s place and hope, 
because I thought that standing, as many of you 
now do, on the threshold of this College, girt and 
ready to go and assume tasks, public and private, | 
in your country, you would not be sorry to be ad- 
monished of those primary duties of the intellect 
whereof you will seldom hear from the lips of your 
new companions. You will hear every day the 

_ fmaxims of a low prudence. You will hear that 
- _ the first duty is to get land and money, place and 
(name. ‘What is this Truth you seek? what is 
“this Beauty?’ men will ask, with derision. If. 
nevertheless God have called any of you to explore 


LITERARY ETHICS. 179 


truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, be true. When 
you shall say, ‘As others do, so will I: I renounce, 
I am sorry for it, my early visions; I must eat the 
good of the land and let learning and romantic ex- 
pectations go, until a more convenient season ;’ — 
then dies the man in you; then once more perish 
the buds of art, and poetry, and science, as they 
have died already in a thousand thousand men. 
The hour of that choice is the crisis of your his- 
tory, and see that you hold yourself fast by the in- 
tellect. Itis this domineering temper of the sen- 
sual world that creates the extreme need of the 
priests of science ; and it is the office and right of 
the intellect to make and not take its estimate. 
Bend to the persuasion which is flowing to you 
from every object in nature, to be its tongue to 
the heart of man, and to show the besotted world } 
how passing fair is wisdom. Forewarned that the 

vice of the times and the country is an excessive 

pretension, let us seek the shade, and find wisdom 

in neglect. Be content with a little light, so it be 

your own. Explore, and explore. Be neither 

chided nor flattered out of your position of per- 

petual inquiry. Neither dogmatize, nor accept an- 

other’s dogmatism. Why should you renounce) 
your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, ) 
for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and \ 
barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. \ 


J 


180 LITERARY ETHICS. 


Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind 
will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such 
as shall not take away your property in all men’s 
possessions, in all men’s affections, in art, in na- 
ture, and in hope. 

You will not fear that I am enjoining too stern 
an asceticism. Ask not, Of what use is a scholar- 
ship that systematically retreats? or, Who is the 
better for the philosopher who conceals his accom- 
plishments, and hides his thoughts from the wait- 
ing world? Hides his thoughts! Hide the sun 
and moon. Thought is all light, and publishes it- 
self to the universe. It will speak, though you 
were dumb, by its own miraculous organ. It will 
flow out of your actions, your manners, and your 
face. It will bring you friendships. It will im- 
pledge you to truth by the love and expectation of 
generous minds. By virtue of the laws of that Na- 
ture which is one and perfect, it shall yield every 
sincere good that is in the soul to the scholar be- 
loved of earth and heaven. 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE SOCIETY OF THE ADELPHI. 
IN WATERVILLE COLLEGE, MAINE, AUGUST 11, 1841. 


Hage WCE AHSCT RAY Pe 


YEE PRAT Be 





THE METHOD OF NATURE. 





GENTLEMEN, 

Let us exchange congratulations on the enjoy- 
ments and the promises of this literary anniver- 
sary. ‘The land we live in has no interest so dear, 
if it knew its want, as the fit consecration of days 
of reason and thought. Where there is no vision, 
the people perish. The scholars are the priests of 
that thought which establishes the foundations of 
the earth. No matter what is their special work 
or profession, they stand for the spiritual interest 
of the world, and it is a common calamity if they 
neglect their post in a country where the material 
interest is so predominant as it is in America. We 
hear something too much of the results of machin- 
ery, commerce, and the useful arts. We are a 
puny and a fickle folk. Avarice, hesitation, and 
following, are our diseases. The rapid wealth 
which hundreds in the community acquire in trade, 
or by the incessant expansions of our population 
and arts, enchants the eyes of all the rest ; the luck 
ef one is the hope of thousands, and the bribe acts 


184 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


like the neighborhood of a gold mine to impoverish 
the farm, the school, the church, the house, and the 
very body and feature of man. 

I do not wish to look with sour aspect at the in- 
dustrious manufacturing village, or the mart of 
commerce. I love the music of the water-wheel ; 
I value the railway; I feel. the pride which the 
sight of a ship inspires; I look on trade and every 
mechanical craft as education also. But let me dis- 
criminate what is precious herein. There is in each 

«of these works an act of invention, an intellectual 
(step, or short series of steps, taken ; that act or step 
is the spiritual act; all the rest is mere repetition 
of the same a thousand times. And I will not be 
‘deceived into admiring the routine of handicrafts 
and mechanics, how splendid soever the result, any 
more than I admire the routine of the scholars or 
clerical class. That splendid results ensue from the 
labors of stupid men, is the fruit of higher laws than 
their will, and the routine is not to be praised for 
it. I would not have the laborer sacrificed to the 
result, — I would not have the laborer sacrificed to 
my convenience and pride, nor to that of a great 
class of such as me. Let there be worse cotton and 
better men. The weaver should not be bereaved of 
his superiority to his work, and his knowledge that 
the product or the skill is of no value, except so far 
as it embodies his spiritual prerogatives. If I see 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 185 


nothing to admire in the unit, shall [ admire a mil- 
lion units? Men stand in awe of the city, but do 
not honor any individual citizen; and are contin- | 
ually yielding to this dazzling result of numbers,| 
that which they would never yield to the solitary, 
example of any one. | 

Whilst the multitude of men degrade each other, 
and give currency to desponding doctrines, the 
scholar must be a bringer of hope, and must rein- 
force man against himself. I sometimes believe 
that our literary anniversaries will presently assume 
a greater importance, as the eyes of men open to 
their capabilities. Here, a new set of distinctions, 
a new order of ideas, prevail. Here, we set a bound 
to the respectability of wealth, and a bound to the 
pretensions of the law and the church. The bigot 
must cease to be a bigot to-day. Into our charmed 
circle, power cannot enter; and the sturdiest de- 
fender of existing institutions feels the terrific in- 
flammability of this air which condenses heat in 
every corner that may restore to the elements the 
fabrics of ages. Nothing solid is secure ; every 
thing tilts and rocks. Even the scholar is not safe; 
he too is searched and revised. Is his learning 
dead ? Is he living in his memory? The power 
of mind is not mortification, but life. But come 
forth, thou curious child! hither, thou loving, all- 
hoping poet! hither, thou tender, doubting heart, 


186 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


which hast not yet found any place in the world’s 
market fit for thee ; any wares which thou couldst 
buy or sell, — so large is thy love and ambition, — 
thine and not theirs is the hour. Smooth thy brow, 
and hope and love on, for the kind Heaven justifies 
thee, and the whole world feels that thou art in the 
right. 

We ought to celebrate this hour by expressions 
of manly joy. Not thanks, not prayer seem quite 
the highest or truest name for our communication 
with the infinite, — but glad and conspiring recep- 
tion, — reception that becomes giving in its turn, 
as the receiver is only the All-Giver in part and in 
infancy. I cannot,—nor ean any man, — speak pre- 
cisely of things so sublime, but it seems to me the 
wit of man, his strength, his grace, his tendency, 
his art, is the grace and the presence of God. It is 
beyond explanation. When all is said and done, 
_ the rapt saint is found the only logician. Not 
exhortation, not argument becomes our lips, but 
peans of joy and praise. But not of adulation: 
we are too nearly related in the deep of the mind 
to that we honor. It is God inus which checks the 
language of petition by a grander thought. In the 
bottom of the heart it is said; ‘I am, and by me, 
O child! this fair body and world of thine stands 
and grows. Iam; all things are mine: and all 
» mine are thine.’ 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 187 


The festival of the intellect and the return to its 
source cast a strong light on the always interesting 
topics of Man and Nature. We are forcibly re- 
minded of the old want. There is no man ; there 
hath never been. The Intellect still asks that a 
man may be born. The flame of life flickers feebly 
in human breasts. We demand of men a richness 
and universality we do not find. Great men do not 
content us. It is their solitude, not their force, 
that makes them conspicuous. There is somewhat 
indigent and tedious about them. They are poorly 
tied to one thought. If they are prophets they are 
egotists ; if polite and various they are shallow. 
How tardily men arrive at any result! how tardily 
they pass from it to another! The crystal sphere 
of thought is as concentrical as the geological struc- 
ture of the globe. As our soils and rocks lie in 
strata, concentric strata, so do all men’s thinkings 
run laterally, never vertically. Here comes by a 
great inquisitor with auger and plumb-line, and 
will bore an Artesian well through our conventions 
and theories, and pierce to the core of things. But 
as soon as he probes the crust, behold gimlet, 
plumb-line, and philosopher take a lateral direc- 
tion, in spite of all resistance, as if some strong 
wind took everything off its feet, and if you come 
month after month to see what progress our re- 
former has made, — not an inch has he pierced, — 


188 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


you still find him with new words in the old place, 
floating about in new parts of the same old vein or 
crust. The new book says, ‘I will give you the 
key to nature,’ and we expect to go like a thunder- 
bolt to the centre. But the thunder is a surface 
phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does 
the sage. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. 
Thus a man lasts but a very little while, for his 
monomania becomes insupportably tedious in a few 
months. It is so with every book and person : and 
yet — and yet — we do not take up a new book or 
meet a new man without a pulse-beat of expecta- 
tion. And this invincible hope of a more adequate 
interpreter is the sure prediction of his advent. 

In the absence of man, we turn to nature, which 
stands next. In the divine order, intellect is pri- 
mary; nature, secondary ; it is the memory of the 
mind. That which once existed in intellect as pure 
law, has now taken body as Nature. It existed al- 
ready in the mind in solution; now, it has been 
precipitated, and the bright sediment is the world. 
We can never be quite strangers or inferiors in na- 
ture. Itis flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone. 
But we no longer hold it by the hand; we have 
lost our miraculous power; our arm is no more 
as strong as the frost, nor our will equivalent to 
gravity and the elective attractions. Yet we can 
use nature as @ convenient standard, and the 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 189 


meter of our rise and fall. It has this advan- 
tage as a witness, it cannot be debauched. When 
man curses, nature still testifies to truth and love. 
We may’ therefore safely study the mind in na- 
ture, because we cannot steadily gaze on it in 
mind ; as we explore the face of the sun in a 
pool, when our eyes cannot brook his direct splen- 
dors. 

It seems to me therefore that it were some suit- 
able pean if we should piously celebrate this hour 
by exploring the method of nature. Let us see 
that, as nearly as we can, and try how far it is 
transferable to the literary life. Every earnest 
glance we give to the realities around us, with in- 
tent to learn, proceeds from a holy impulse, and 
is really songs of praise. What difference can it 
make whether it take the shape of exhortation, or 
of passionate exclamation, or of scientific state- 
ment? These are forms merely. Through them 


we express, at last, the fact that God has done 


thus or thus. 

In treating a subject so large, in which we must 
necessarily appeal to the intuition, and aim much 
more to suggest than to describe, I know it is not 
easy to speak with the precision attainable on top- 
ics of less scope. Ido not wish in attempting to 
paint a man, to describe an air-fed, unimpassioned, 
impossible ghost. My eyes and ears are revolted 


190 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


by any neglect of the physical facts, the limitations 
of man. And yet one who conceives the true 
order of nature, and beholds the visible as proceed- 
ing from the invisible, cannot state his’ thought 
without seeming to those who study the physical 
laws to do them some injustice. There is an in- 
trinsic defect in the organ. Language overstates. 
Statements of the infinite are usually felt to be un- 
just to the finite, and blasphemous. Hmpedocles 
undoubtedly spoke a truth of thought, when he 
said, “1 am God;” but the moment it was out of 
his mouth it became a he to the ear; and the world 
revenged itself for the seeming arrogance by the 
good story about his shoe. How can I hope for 
better hap in my attempts to enunciate spiritual 
facts? Yet let us hope that as far as we receive 
the truth, so far shall we be felt by every true per- 
son to say what is just. 

The method of nature: who could ever analyze 
it? That rushing stream will not stop to be ob- 
served. We can never surprise nature in a corner ; 
never find the end of a thread ; never tell where to 
set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay her egg : 
the egg hastens to be a bird. The wholeness we 
admire in the order of the world is the result of in- 
finite distribution. Its smoothness is the smooth- 
ness of the pitch of the cataract. Its permanence 
is a perpetual inchoation. Every natural fact is an 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 191 


emanation, and that from which it emanates is an 
emanation also, and from every emanation is a new 
emanation. If anything could stand still, it would 
be crushed and dissipated by the torrent it resisted, 
and if it were a mind, would be crazed; as insane 
persons are those who hold fast to one thought and 
do not flow with the course of nature. Not the 
cause, but an ever novel effect, nature descends al- 
ways from above. It is unbroken obedience. The 
beauty of these fair objects is imported into them 
from a metaphysical and eternal spring. In all 
animal and vegetable forms, the physiologist con- 
cedes that no chemistry, no mechanics, can account 
for the facts, but a mysterious principle of life must 
be assumed, which not only inhabits the organ but 
makes the organ. 

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet 
without place to insert an atom;— in graceful 
succession, in equal fulness, in balanced beauty, the 
dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an 
odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, 
it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, 
nor unravelled, nor shown. Away profane phil- 
osopher! seekest thou in nature the cause? ‘This 
refers to that, and that to the next, and the next to 
the third, and everything refers. Thou must ask 
in another mood, thou must feel it and love it, thou 
must behold it in a spirit as grand as that by which 


192 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


it exists, ere thou canst know the law. Known it 
will not be, but gladly beloved and enjoyed. 

The simultaneous life throughout the whole body, 
the equal serving of innumerable ends without the 
least emphasis or preference to any, but the steady 
degradation of each to the success of all, allows the 
understanding no place to work. Nature can only 
be conceived as existing to a universal and not to a 
particular end; to a universe of ends, and not to 
one, —a work of ecstasy, to be represented by a 
circular movement, as intention might be signified 
by a straight line of definite length. Each effect 
strengthens every other. There is no revolt in all 
the kingdoms from the commonweal: no detach- 
ment of an individual. Hence the catholic charac- 
ter which makes every leaf an exponent of the 
world. When we behold the landscape in a poetic 
spirit, we do not reckon individuals. Nature knows 
‘neither palm nor oak, but only vegetable life, which 
_ sprouts into forests, and festoons the globe with a 
garland of grasses and vines. 

That no single end may be selected and nature 
judged thereby, appears from this, that if man him- 
self be considered as the end, and it be assumed 
that the final cause of the world is to make holy or 
wise or beautiful men, we see that it has not suc- 
ceeded. Read alternately in natural and in civil 
history, a treatise of astronomy, for example, with 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 198 


a volume of French Mémoires pour servir. When 
we have spent our wonder in computing this waste- 
ful hospitality with which boon Nature turns off 
new firmaments without end into her wide common, 
as fast as the madrepores make coral, — suns and 
planets hospitable to souls, — and then shorten the 
sight to look into this court of Louis Quatorze, and 
see the game that is played there, — duke and mar- 
shal, abbé and madame, —a gambling table where 
each is laying traps for the other, where the end is 
ever by some lie or fetch to outwit your rival and 
ruin him with this solemn fop in wig and stars, — 
the king;—one can hardly help asking if this 
planet is a fair specimen of the so generous astron- 
omy, and if so, whether the experiment have not 
failed, and whether it be quite worth while to make 
more, and glut the innocent space with so poor an 
article. 

I think we feel not much otherwise if, instead of 
beholding foolish nations, we take the great and 
wise men, the eminent souls, and narrowly inspect 
their biography. None of them seen by himself, 
and his performance compared with his promise or 
idea, will justify the cost of that enormous apparatus 
of means by which this spotted and defective per- 
son was at last procured. 

To questions of this sort, Nature replies, “I grow.” 


Allis nascent, infant. When we are dizzied with 
VOL. I. 13 


194 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


the arithmetic of the savant toiling to compute the 
length of her line, the return of her curve, we are 
steadied by the perception that a great deal is doing ; 
that all seems just begun: remote aims are in act- 
ive accomplishment. We can point nowhere to 
anything final; but tendency appears on all hands: 
planet, system, constellation, total nature is grow- 
ing like a field of maize in July; is becoming some- 
what else ; is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo 
does not more strive to be man, than yonder burr 
of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a com- 
et, a globe, and parent of new stars. Why should 
not then these messieurs of Versailles strut and 
plot for tabourets and ribbons, for a season, with- 
out prejudice to their faculty to run on_ better 
errands by and by? 

But Nature seems further to reply, ‘I have ven- 
tured so great a stake as my success, in no single 
creature. I have not yet arrived at any end. The 
gardener aims to produce a fine peach or pear, but 
my aim is the health of the whole tree, — root, 
stem, leaf, flower, and seed,-—-and by no means 
the pampering of a monstrous pericarp at the ex- 
pense of all the other functions.’ 

In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that im- 
pression nature makes on us is this, that it does 
not exist to any one or to any number of particular 
ends, but to numberless and endless benefit; that 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 195 


there is in it no private will, no rebel leaf or limb, 
but the whole is oppressed by one superincumbent 
tendency, obeys that redundancy or excess of life 
which in conscious beings we call ecstasy. 

With this conception of the genius or method of 
‘nature, let us go back to man. It is true he pre- 
tends to give account of himself to himself, but, at 
last, what has he to recite but the fact that there is 
a Life not to be described or known otherwise than 
by possession ? What account can he give of his 
essence more than so it was to be? The royal rea- 
son, the Grace of God, seems the only description 
of our multiform but ever identical fact. There is 
virtue, there is genius, there is success, or there is 
not. There is the incoming or the receding of 
God: that is all we can affirm; and we can show 
neither how nor why.  Self-accusation, remorse, 
and the didactic morals of self-denial and strife 
with sin, is a view we are constrained by our con- 
stitution to take of the fact seen from the platform 
of action; but seen from the platform of intellec- 
tion there is nothing for us but praise and wonder. 

The termination of the world in a man appears 
to be the last victory of intelligence. The univer- 
sal does not attract us until housed in an individ- 
ual. Who heeds the waste abyss of possibility ? 
The ocean is everywhere the same, but it has no 
character urtil seen with the shore or the ship. 


196 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


| Who would value any number of miles of Atlantic 
_ brine bounded by lines of latitude and longitude? 


Confine it by granite rocks, let it wash a shore 


where wise men dwell, and it is filled with expres- 
sion ; and the point of greatest interest is where the 


land and water meet. So must we admire in man 
‘the form of the formless, the concentration of the 


vast, the house of reason, the cave of memory. See 
the play of thoughts! what nimble gigantic crea- 
tures are these! what saurians, what palaiotheria 
shall be named with these agile movers? The 
great Pan of old, who was clothed in a leopard 
skin to signify the beautiful variety of things and 
the firmament, his coat of stars, — was but the rep- 


resentative of thee, O rich and various Man! thou 


palace of sight and sound, carrying in thy senses 
the morning and the night and the unfathomable 


galaxy; in thy brain, the geometry of the City 


of God; in thy heart, the bower of love and the 


realms of right and wrong. An individual man is 
a fruit which it cost all the foregoing ages to form 
and ripen. The history of the genesis or the old 
mythology repeats itself in the experience of every 
child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a 
particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead 
things from disorder into order. Each individual 
soul is such in virtue of its being a power to trans- 
late the world into some particular language of its 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 197 


own ; if not into a picture, a statue, or a dance, — 
why, then, into a trade, an art, a science, a mode of 
living, a conversation, a character, an influence. 
You admire pictures, but it is as impossible for 
you to paint a right picture as for grass to bear 
apples. But when the genius comes, it makes fin- 
gers: itis pliancy, and the power of transferring 
the affair in the street into oils and colors. Ra- 
phael must be born, and Salvator must be born. 
There is no attractiveness like that of a new 
man. ‘The sleepy nations are occupied with their 
political routine. England, France and America 
read Parliamentary Debates, which no high genius 
now enlivens; and nobody will read them who 
trusts his own eye: only they who are deceived by 
the popular repetition of distinguished names. But 
when Napoleon unrolls his map, the eye is com-), 
manded by original power. When Chatham leads 
the debate, men may well listen, because they must 
listen. A man, a personal ascendency, is the only .~ 
great phenomenon. When Nature has work to be 
done, she creates a genius to do it. Follow the 
great man, and you shall see what the world has at 
heart in these ages. There is no omen like that. 
But what strikes us in the fine genius is that 
which belongs of right to every one. A man 
should know himself for a necessary actor. A link 
was wanting between two craving parts of nature, 


198 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


and he was hurled into being as the bridge over 
that yawning need, the mediator betwixt two else 
unmarriageable facts. His two parents held each 
of one of the wants, and the union of foreign con- 
stitutions in him enables him to do gladly and 
gracefully what the assembled human race could 
not have sufficed to do. He knows his materials ; 
he applies himself to his work; he cannot read, or 
think, or look, but he unites the hitherto separated 
strands into a perfect cord. The thoughts he de- 
lights to utter are the reason of his incarnation. 
Is it for him to account himself cheap and super- 
fluous, or to linger by the wayside for opportuni- 
ties? Did he not come into being because some- 
thing must be done which he and no other is and 
does? If only he sees, the world will be visible 
enough. He need not study where to stand, nor 
to put things in favorable lights; in him is the 
light, from him all things are illuminated to their 
centre. What patron shall he ask for employment 
and reward? MHereto was he born, to deliver the 
thought of his heart from the universe to the uni- 
verse; to do an office which nature could not fore- 
go, nor he be discharged from rendering, and then 
immerge again into the holy silence and eternity 
out of which as a man he arose. God is rich, and 
many more men than one he harbors in his bosom, 
biding their time and the needs and the beauty oi 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 199 


all. Is not this the theory of every man’s genius 
or faculty? Why then goest thou as some Bos- 
well or listening worshipper to this saint or to that? 
That is the only lese-majesty. Here art thou with 
whom so long the universe travailed in labor; dar- 
est thou think meanly of thyself whom the stalwart 
Fate brought forth to unite his ragged sides, to 
shoot the gulf, to reconcile the irreconcilable ? 
Whilst a necessity so great caused the man 
to exist, his health and erectness consist in the 
fidelity with which he transmits influences from 
the vast and universal to the point on which his 
genius can act. The ends are momentary; they 
are vents for the current of inward life which in- 
creases as it is spent. A man’s wisdom is to know 
that all ends are momentary, that the best end 
must be superseded by a better. But there is a 
mischievous tendency in him to transfer his thought 
from the life to the ends, to quit his agency and 
rest in his acts: the tools run away with the 


workman, the human with the divine. I conceive\ 


a man as always spoken. to from behind; and un- 


able to turn his head and see the speaker. In all | 


the millions who have heard the voice, none ever | 


saw the face. As children in their play run be- 
hind each other, and seize one by the ears and 
make him walk before them, so is the spirit our 
unseen pilot. That well-known voice speaks in all 


200 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


languages, governs all men, and none ever caught 
a glimpse of its form. If the man will exactly 
obey it, it will adopt him, so that he shall not any 
longer separate it from himself in his thought; he 
shall seem to be it, he shall be it. If he listen 
with insatiable ears, richer and greater wisdom is 
taught him; the sound swells to a ravishing music, 
he is borne away as with a flood, he becomes care- 
less of his food and of his house, he is the fool of 
ideas, and leads a heavenly life. But if his eye is 
set on the things to be done, and not on the truth 
that is still taught, and for the sake of which the 
things are to be done, then the voice grows faint, 
and at last is but a humming in his ears. His 
health and greatness consist in his being the channel 
through which heaven flows to earth, in short, in the 
fulness in which an ecstatical state takes place in 
him. It is pitiful to be an artist, when by forbear- 
ing to be artists we might be vessels filled with the 
divine overflowings, enriched by the circulations of 
omniscience and omnipresence. Are there not mo- 
ments in the history of heaven when the human 
race was not counted by individuals, but was only 
the Influenced, was God in distribution, God rush- 
ing into multiform benefit? It is sublime to re- 
ceive, sublime to love, but this lust of imparting as 
from us, this desire to be loved, the wish to be 





recognized as individuals, —is finite, comes of a 


lower strain. 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 201 


Shall I say then that as far as we can trace the 
natural history of the soul, its health consists in 
the fulness of its reception ?— call it piety, call it 
veneration, — in the fact that enthusiasm is organ- 
ized therein. What is best in any work of art but 
that part which the work itself seems to require 
and do; that which the man cannot do again; that 
which flows from the hour and the occasion, like 
the eloquence of men in a tumultuous debate? It 
was always the theory of literature that the word 
of a poet was authoritative and final. He was 
supposed to be the mouth of a divine wisdom. 
We rather envied his circumstance than his talent. 
We too could have gladly prophesied standing in 
that place. We so quote our Scriptures; and the 
Greeks so quoted Homer, Theognis, Pindar, and 
the rest. If the theory has receded out of modern 
criticism, it is because we have not had _ poets. 
Whenever they appear, they will redeem their own 
credit. 

This eestatical state seems to direct a regard to 
the whole and not to the parts; to the cause and 
not to the ends ; to the tendency and not to the act. 
Tt respects genius and not talent; hope, and not 
possession ; the anticipation of all things by the 
intellect, and not the history itself; art, and not 
works of art; poetry, and not experiment; virtue, 
and not duties. 


202 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


There is no office or function of man but is 
rightly discharged by this divine method, and noth- 
ing that is not noxious to him if detached from its 
universal relations. Is it his work in the world to 
study nature, or the laws of the world? Let him 
beware of proposing to himself any end. Is it for 
use ? nature is debased, as if one looking at the 
ocean can remember only the price of fish. Or is 
it for pleasure? he is mocked ; there is a certain in- 
fatuating air in woods and mountains which draws 
on the idler to want and misery. ‘There is some- 
thing social and intrusive in the nature of all 
things ; they seek to penetrate and overpower each 
the nature of every other creature, and itself alone 
in all modes and throughout space and spirit to 
prevail and possess. Every star in heaven is dis — 
contented and insatiable. Gravitation and chem- 
istry cannot content them. Ever they woo and 
court the eye of every beholder. Every man who 
comes into the world they seek to fascinate and 
possess, to pass into his mind, for they desire to re- 
publish themselves in a more delicate world than 
that they occupy. It isnot enough that they are 
Jove, Mars, Orion, and the North Star, in the grav- 
itating firmament ; they would have such poets as 
Newton, Herschel, and .Laplace, that they may re- 
exist and re-appear in the finer world of rational 
souls, and fill that realm with their fame. So is it 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 203 


with all immaterial objects. These beautiful basi- 
lisks set their brute glorious eyes on the eye of 
every child, and, if they can, cause their nature to 
pass through his wondering eyes into him, and so 
all things are mixed. 

Therefore man must be on his guard against this 
cup of enchantments, and must look at nature with 
a supernatural eye. By piety alone, by conversing 
with the cause of nature, is he safe and commands 
it. And because all knowledge is assimilation to 
the object of knowledge, as the power or genius of 
nature is ecstatic, so must its science or the descrip- 
tion of it be. The poet must be a rhapsodist; his 
inspiration a sort of bright casualty; his will in it 
only the surrender of will to the Universal Power, 
which will not be seen face to face, but must be re- 
ceived and sympathetically known. It is remark- 
able that we have out of the deeps of antiquity in 
the oracles ascribed to the half fabulous Zoroaster, 
a statement of this fact which every lover and 
seeker of truth will recognize. ‘“Itis not proper,” 
said Zoroaster, “ to understand the Intelligible 
with vehemence, but if you incline your mind, you 
will apprehend it: not too earnestly, but bringing 
a pure and inquiring eye. You will not understand 
it as when understanding some particular thing, 
but with the flower of the mind. Things divine 
are not attainable by mortals who understand sen-< 


904 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


sual things, but only the light-armed arrive at the 
summit.” 

And because ecstasy is the law and cause of na- 
ture, therefore you cannot interpret it in too high 
and deep a sense. Nature represents the best 
meaning of the wisest man. Does the sunset land- 
scape seem to you the place of Friendship, — those 
purple skies and lovely waters the amphitheatre 
dressed and garnished only for the exchange of 
thought and love of the purest souls? It is that. 
All other meanings which base men have put on it 
are conjectural and false. You cannot bathe twice 
in the same river, said Heraclitus; and I add, a 
man never sees the same object twice:. with his 
own enlargement the object acquires new aspects. 

Does not the same law hold for virtue? It is 
vitiated by too much will. He who aims at prog- 
ress should aim at an infinite, not at a special ben- 
efit. The reforms whose fame now fills the land 
with Temperance, Anti-Slavery, Non-Resistance, 
No Government, Equal Labor, fair and generous 
as each appears, are poor bitter things when prose- 
cuted for themselves as an end. To every reform, 
in proportion to its energy, early disgusts are inci- 
dent, so that the disciple is surprised at the very 
hour of his first triumphs with chagrins, and sick- 
ness, and a general distrust; so that he shuns his 
associates, hates the enterprise which lately seemed 


THE METIIOD OF NATURE. 205 


so fair, and meditates to cast himself into the arms 
of that society and manner of life which he had 
newly abandoned with so much pride and hope. 
Is it that he attached the value of virtue to some 
particular practices, as the denial of certain appe- 
tites in certain specified indulgences, and afterward 
found himself still as wicked and as far from hap- 
piness in that abstinence as he had been in the 
abuse? But the soul can be appeased not by a 
deed but by a tendency. It is in a hope that she 
feels her wings. You shall love rectitude, and not 
the disuse of money or the avoidance of trade; an 
unimpeded mind, and not a monkish diet ; sympa-_ 
thy_and_usefulness, and_not_hoeing or _coopering. 
Tell me not how ereat your project is, the civil lib- 
eration of the world, its conversion into a Christian 
church, the establishment of public education, 
cleaner diet, 2 new division of labor and of land, 
laws of love for laws of property ;—JI say to you 
plainly there is no end to which your practical fac- 
ulty can aim, so sacred or so large, that, if pursued 
for itself, will not at last become carrion and an of- 
fence to the nostril. The imaginative faculty of 
the soul must be fed with objects immense and 
eternal. Your end should be one inapprehensible 
to the senses; then will it be a god always ap- 
proached, never touched ; always giving health. A 
man adorns himself with prayer and love, as an 


206 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


aim adorns an action. What is strong but good- 
ness, and what is energetic but the presence of a 
brave man? The doctrine in vegetable physiology 
of the presence, or the general influence of any 
substance over and above its chemical influence, as 
of an alkali or a living plant, is more predicable of 
man. You need not speak to me, J need not go 
where you are, that you should exert magnetism on 
me. Be you only whole and sufficient, and I shall 
feel you in every part of my life and fortune, and 
I can as easily dodge the gravitation of the globe 
as escape your influence. 

But there are other examples of this total and 
supreme influence, besides Nature and the con- 
science. ‘¢From the poisonous tree, the world,” 
say the Brahmins, “two species of fruit are pro- 
duced, sweet as the waters of life; Love or the so- 
ciety of beautiful souls, and Poetry, whose taste is 
like the immortal juice of Vishnu.” What is Love, 
and why is it the chief good, but because it is an 
overpowering enthusiasm? Never self-possessed or 
prudent, it is all abandonment. Is it not a certain 
admirable wisdom, preferable to all other advan- 
tages, and whereof all others are only secondaries 
and indemnities, because this is that in which the in- 
dividual is no longer his own foolish master, but in- 
hales an odorous and celestial air, is wrapped round 
with awe of the object, blending for the time that 


THE METHOD OF NATORE. 207 


object with the real and only good, and consults 
every omen in nature with tremulous interest? 
When we speak truly, —is not he only unhappy 
who is not in love? his fancied freedom and self- 
rule —is it not so much death? He who is in love 
is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every, 
time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from) 
it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it} 


possesses. Therefore if the object be not itself a\ 
living and expanding soul, he presently exhausts it. / 
But the love remains in his mind, and the wisdom ‘| 
it brought him; and it craves a new and higher > 


object. And the reason why all men honor love is 
because it looks up and not down; aspires and not 
despairs. 

And what is Genius but finer love, a love imper- 
sonal, a love of the flower and perfection of things, 
and a desire to draw a new picture or copy of the 
same? It looks to the cause and life: it proceeds 


from within outward, whilst Talent goes from with- | 


out inward. ‘Talent finds its models, methods, and 
ends, in society, exists for exhibition, and goes to 
the soul only for power to work. Genius is its own 


end, and draws its means and the style of its archi-. 


tecture from within, going abroad only for audience 
and spectator, as we adapt our voice and phrase 
to the distance and character of the ear we speak 
to. All your learning of all literatures would never 


208 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


enable you to anticipate one of its thoughts or ex- 
pressions, and yet each is natural and familiar 
as household words. Here about us coils forever 
the ancient enigma, so old and so unutterable. Be- 
hold! there is the sun, and the rain, and the rocks; 
the old sun, the old stones. How easy were it to 
describe all this fitly ; yet no word can pass. Na- 
ture is a mute, and man, her articulate, speaking 
brother, lo! he also is a mute. Yet when Genius 
arrives, its speech is like a river; it has no strain- 
ing to describe, more than there is straining in na- 
ture to exist. When thought is best, there is most 
of it. Genius sheds wisdom like perfume, and ad- 
vertises us that it flows out of a deeper source than 
the foregoing silence, that it knows so deeply and 
speaks so musically, because it is itself a mutation 
of the thing it describes. It is sun and moon and 
wave and fire in music, as astronomy is thought 
and harmony in masses of matter. 

What is all history but the work of ideas, a rec- 
ord of the incomputible energy which his infinite 
aspirations infuse into man? Has anything grand 
and lasting been done? Who did it? Plainly not 
any man, but all men: it was the prevalence and 
inundation of an idea. What brought the pilgrims 
here? One man says, civil liberty ; another, the 
desire of founding a church; and a third discovers 
that the motive force was plantation and trade. 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 209 


But if the Puritans could rise from the dust they 
could not answer. It is to be seen in what they 
were, and not in what they designed; it was the 
growth and expansion of the human race, and re- 
sembled herein the sequent Revolution, which was 
not begun in Concord, or Lexington, or Virginia, 
but was the overflowing of the sense of natural 
right in every clear and active spirit of the period, 
Is a man boastful and knowing, and his own mas- 
ter ?— we turn from him without hope: but let 
him be filled with awe and dread before the Vast 
and the Divine, which uses him glad to be used, 
and our eye is riveted tothe chain of events. What 
a debt is ours to that old religion which, in the 
childhood of most of us, still dwelt like a sabbath 
morning in the country of New England, teaching 
privation, self-denial and sorrow! A man was born 
not for prosperity, but to sutfer for the benefit of 
others, like the noble rock-maple which all around 
our villages bleeds for the service of man. Not 
praise, not men’s acceptance of our doing, but the 
spirit’s holy errand through us absorbed the thought. 
How dignified was this! How all that is called tal- 
ents and success, in our noisy capitals, becomes 
buzz and din before this man-worthiness! How 
our friendships and the complaisances we use, shame 
us now! Shall we not quit our companions, as if 
they were thieves and pot-companions, and betake 


VOL. I. 14 


210 THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


ourselves to some desert cliff of Mount Katahdin, 
some unvisited recess in Moosehead Lake, to bewail 
our innocency and to recover it, and with it the 
power to communicate again with these sharers of 
a more sacred idea? 

And what is to replace for us the piety of that 
race? We cannot have theirs; it glides away 
from us day by day; but we also can bask in the 
_ great morning which rises forever out of the eastern 
sea, and be ourselves the children of the light. I 
stand here to say, Let us worship the mighty and 
transcendent Soul. It is the office, I doubt not, of 
this age to annul that adulterous divorce which the. 
superstition of many ages has effected between the 
intellect and holiness. The lovers of goodness have 
been one class, the students of wisdom another; as 
if either could exist in any purity without the other. 
Truth is always holy, holiness always wise. I will 
that we keep terms with sin and a sinful literature 
and society no longer, but live a life of discovery 
and performance. Accept the intellect, and it will 
accept us. Be the lowly ministers of that pure om- 
niscience, and deny it not before men. It will burn 
up all profane literature, all base current opinions, 
all the false powers of the world, as in a moment of 
time. I draw from nature the lesson of an intimate 
divinity. Our health and reason as men need our 
respect to this fact, against the heedlessness and 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. 211 


against the contradiction of society. The sanity of 
man needs the poise of this immanent force. His 
nobility needs the assurance of this inexhaustible 
reserved power. How great soever have been its 
bounties, they are a drop to the sea whence they 
flow. If you say, ‘The acceptance of the vision is 
also the act of God:’—-I shall not seek to pene- 
trate the mystery, I admit the force of what you 
say. If you ask, ‘ How can any rules be given for 
the attainment of gifts so sublime?’ I shall only 
remark that the solicitations of this spirit, as long 
as there is life, are never forborne. Tenderly, ten- 
derly, they woo and court us from every object in | 
nature, from every fact in life, from every thought 
in the mind. The one condition coupled with the 
gift of truth is its use. That man shall be learned 
who reduceth his learning to practice. Emanuel 
Swedenborg affirmed that it was opened to him 
“that the spirits who knew truth in this life, but 
did it not, at death shall lose their knowledge.” | 
“If knowledge,” said Ali the Caliph, “calleth unto , 
practice, well; if not, it goeth away.” The only 
way into nature is to enact our best insight. In- 
stantly we are higher poets, and can speak a deeper 
law. Do what you know, and perception is con- 
verted into character, as islands and continents were 
built by invisible infusories, or as these forest leaves 
absorb light, electricity, and volatile gases, and the 


OAD, THE METHOD OF NATURE. 


gnarled oak to live a thousand years is the arrest 
and fixation of the most volatile and ethereal cur- 
rents. The doctrine of this Supreme Presence is a 

ery of joy and exultation. Who shall dare think 
(he has come late into nature, or has missed any- 
thing excellent in the past, who seeth the admirable 
_ stars of possibility, and the yet untouched continent 
of hope glittering with all its mountains in the vast 
West? I praise with wonder this great reality, 
which seems to drown all things in the deluge of its 
light. What man seeing this, can lose it from his. 
thoughts, or entertain a meaner subject? The en- 
trance of this into his mind seems to be the birth 
of man. We cannot describe the natural history 
of the soul, but we know that it is divine. I ecan- 
not tell if these wonderful qualities which house to- 
day in this mortal frame shall ever re-assemble in 
equal activity in a similar frame, or whether they 
have before had a natural history like that of this 
body you see before you; but this one thing I know, 
that these qualities did not now begin to exist, can- 
not be sick with my sickness, nor buried in any 
grave; but that they circulate through the Universe: 
\ before the world was, they were. Nothing can bar 
* them out, or shut them in, but they penetrate the 
ocean and land, space and time, form an essence, 
and hold the key to universal nature. I draw from 


this faith, courage and hope. All things are known. 


THE METHOD OF NATURE. Z13 


to the soul. It is not to be surprised by any com- 
munication. Nothing can be greater than it. Let 
those fear and those fawn who will. The soul is in 
her native realm, and it is wider than space, older 
than time, wide as hope, rich as love. Pusillanim-. 
ity and fear she refuses with a beautiful scorn ; 
they are not for her who puts on her coronation 
robes, and goes out through universal love to uni- | 
versal power. 

















“gave gas ea cherub okey 
pak ab endt chtoing state gio lam 
_ 7) ia WE hays BAT Ee tsossealltgedb ach 

oa “Speifeho, wday coteld RAE. af his jrock” detigt tetele ae 


Uhiew Th -ndoradeone Hone ean me abbey ante aoe 


* 
* 
¢ 










aoe 
“* emPUTEL A 


Sree Loh kieicinesien sid aot besiege 
seltnnotog dat dO} edineg. dither: apilendbedinar! waeiieaelS - 
> aval Loaney iets dyitondt9 jae — fase acehies Phe 





%) ie 
P ) bi has ily 
Ms 5 saan a » 
eres cay Rec eae sie en ‘owt: Po 
, . . 
= 
: ; Je é 1 ae 4 , a ‘@ — 
‘ “ a 
‘ z £1 ' | vas 8S 
=, T > 
4 F 1% rt ae 
Ri * 
; x i a i eet wes 
4 
=; 
* r a de ee $ 
t t 3 , E 
ie ’ i 
' a ‘ ae or, 
G6 - ’ 
: * | “ 
* at a i pe: iew . ‘ 
are : =) a a ie ¢ “s ‘a 
: . Mb ; : | 
* i . 
hd i - ; 3 de Pe r ‘ 
2 - * . 4 ' | 
r ms 7 
he ) x : 
Po = ; ¥ = 
- at eS) 
rs y - | | 
. : iy af vee i 
i > J ) bi “i ate “Ae 
- z 7 
i 5¢ 07 tk 
he en > i 4 Sera 
Pe, 
x 4 y 
Twa r 4 iy rat 4 oy 
J : 
Bi 4 \*% * us a | vik » bee } #1 i 
. . n r 
‘ : ‘ hari es 
7 > ae 
i ‘ 4 a shrew ao | P i. 2 i 4 Lae 
it) r 
ae ; 





MAN THE REFORMER. 


A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE MECHANICS’ APPRENTICES: 
LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, BOSTON, JANUARY 25, 1841. 


« 


Te Gs 
ihe ie ee BE i 


(4 REPU GEE TREY 1 
Ee ei, EAE 
- + ut 7 





MAN THE REFORMER. 





Mr. PRESIDENT, AND GENTLEMEN, 


I wisH to offer to your consideration some 
thoughts on the particular and general relations of 
man as a reformer. I shall assume that the aim 
of each young man in this association is the very 
highest that belongs to a rational mind. Let it be. 
granted that our life, as we lead it, is common and 
mean; that some of those offices and functions for 
which we were mainly created are grown so rare in 
society that the memory of them is only kept alive 
in old books and in dim traditions; that prophets 
and poets, that beautiful and perfect men we are 
not now, no, nor have even seen such; that some 
sources of human instruction are almost unnamed 
and unknown among us; that the community in\ 
which we live will hardly bear to be told that; 
every man should be open to ecstasy or a divine, 
illumination, and his daily walk elevated by inter-) 
course with the spiritual world. Grant all this, 
as we must, yet I suppose none of my auditors will 
deny that we ought to seek to establish ourselves 


218 MAN THE REFORMER. 


‘in such disciplines and courses as will deserve that 
guidance and clearer communication with the spir- 
itual nature. And further, I will not dissemble 
my hope that each person whom I address has felt 
his own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidi- 
ties, and limitations, and to be in his place a free 
and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not con- 
tent to slip along- through the world like a footman 
or a spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies 
as many knocks as he can, but a brave and upright 
man, who must find or cut a straight road to 
everything excellent in the earth, and not only go 
honorably himself, but make it easier for all who 
follow him to go in honor and with benefit. 

In the history of the world the doctrine of Re- 
form had never such scope as at the present hour. 
Lutherans, Hernhutters, Jesuits, Monks, Quakers, 
Knox, Wesley, Swedenborg, Bentham, in their 
accusations of society, all respected something, 
—church or state, literature or history, domestic 
usages, the market town, the dinner table, coined 
money. But now all these and all things else hear 
the trumpet, and must rush to judgment, — Chris- 
tianity, the laws, commerce, schools, the farm, the 
laboratory ; and not a kingdom, town, statute, rite, 
calling, man, or woman, but is threatened by the 
new spirit. 

What if some of the objections whereby our in- 


MAN THE REFORMER. 219 


stitutions are assailed are extreme and speculative, 
and the reformers tend to idealism’? That only 
shows the extravagance of the abuses which have 
driven the mind. into the opposite extreme. It is \ 
when your facts and persons grow unreal and fan-. 
tastic by too much falsehood, that the scholar flies: 
for refuge to the world of ideas, and aims to re- 
cruit and replenish nature from that source. Let 
ideas establish their legitimate sway again in so-. 
ciety, let life be fair and poetic, and the scholars 
will gladly be lovers, citizens, and philanthropists. 

It will afford no security from the new ideas, 
that the old nations, the laws of centuries, the . 
property and institutions of a hundred cities, are 
built on other foundations. ‘The demon of reform 
has a secret door into the heart of every lawmaker, 
of every inhabitant of every city. The fact that 
a new thought and hope have dawned in your 
breast, should apprise you that in the same hour a 
new light broke in upon a thousand private hearts. 
That secret which you would fain keep, —as soon 
as you go abroad, lo! there is one standing on the 
doorstep to tell you the same. There is not the. 
most bronzed and sharpened money-catcher who 
does not, to your consternation almost, quail and: 
shake the moment he hears a question prompted. 
by the new ideas. We thought he had some sem. 
blance of ground to stand upon, that such as he aut 


220 MAN THE REFORMER. 


least would die hard; but he trembles and flees. 
Then the scholar says, ‘Cities and coaches shall 
never impose on me again; for behold every soli- 
tary dream of mine is rushing to fulfilment. That 
fancy I had, and hesitated to utter because you 
would laugh, — the broker, the attorney, the mar- 
ket-man are saying the same thing. Had I waited 
a day longer to speak, I had been too late. Be- 
hold, State Street thinks, and Wall Street doubts, 
and begins to prophesy !’ 

It cannot be wondered at that this general in- 
quest into abuses should arise in the bosom of 
society, when one considers the practical impedi- 
ments that stand in the way of virtuous young 
men. The young man, on entering life, finds the 
way to lucrative employments blocked with abuses. 
The ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders 
of theft, and supple to the borders (Gif not beyond 
the borders) of fraud. The employments of com- 
merce are not intrinsically unfit for a man, or less 
genial to his faculties; but these are now in their 
general course so vitiated by derelictions and 
abuses at which all connive, that it requires more 
vigor and resources than can be expected of every 
young man, to right himself in them; he is lost in 
them ; he cannot move hand or foot in them. Has 
he genius and virtue? the less does he find them 
fit for him to grow in, and if he would thrive in 


MAN THE REFORMER. 2M | 


them, he must sacrifice all the brilliant dreams of 
boyhood and youth as dreams; he must forget the 
prayers of his childhood and must take on him the 
harness of routine and obsequiousness. If not so 
minded, nothing is left him but to begin the world 
anew, as he does who puts the spade into the 
ground for food. We are all implicated of course 
in this charge; it is only necessary to ask a few 
questions as to the progress of the articles of com- 
merce from the fields where they grew, to our 
houses, to become aware that we eat and drink and 
wear perjury and fraud in a hundred commodities. 
How many articles of daily consumption are fur. | 
nished us from the West Indies; yet it is said that 
in the Spanish islands the venality-of the officers 
of the government has passed into usage, and that 
no article passes into our ships which has not been 
fraudulently cheapened. In the Spanish islands, 
every agent or factor of the Americans, unless he 
be a consul, has taken oath that he is a Catholic, 
or has caused a priest to make that declaration for 
him. The abolitionist has shown us our dreadful 
debt to the southern negro. In the island of 
Cuba, in addition to the ordinary abominations of 
slavery, it appears only men are bought for the 
plantations, and one dies in ten every year, of 
these miserable bachelors, to yield us sugar. I 
leave for those who have the knowledge the part 


DOD. MAN THE REFORMER. 


of sifting the oaths of our custom-houses; I will 
not inquire into the oppression of the sailors; I 
will not pry into the usages of our retail trade. I 
content myself with the fact that the general sys- 
tem of our trade (apart from the blacker traits, 
which, I hope, are exceptions denounced and un- 
shared by all reputable men), is a system of self- 
ishness; is not dictated by the high sentiments of 
human nature; is not measured by the exact law 
of reciprocity, much less by the sentiments of love 
and heroism, but is a system of distrust, of con- 
cealment, of superior keenness, not of giving but 
of taking advantage. It is not that which a man 
delights to unlock to a noble friend; which he 
meditates on with joy and self-approval in his hour 
of love and aspiration; but rather what he then 
puts out of sight, only showing the brilliant result, 
and atoning for the manner of acquiring, by the 
manner of expending it. I do not charge the mer- 
chant or the manufacturer. The sins of our trade 
belong to no class, to no individual. One plucks, 
one distributes, one eats. Every body partakes, 
every body confesses, — with cap and knee volun- 
teers his confession, yet none feels himself account- 
able. He did not create the abuse; he cannot 
alter it. What is he? an obscure private person 
who must get his bread. ‘That is the vice, — that 
/no one feels himself called to act for man, but only 


MAN THE REFORMER. 223 


as a fraction of man. It happens therefore that 
all such ingenuous souls as feel within themselves 
the irrepressible strivings of a noble aim, who by 
the law of their nature must act simply, find these 
ways of trade unfit for them, and they come forth 
from it. Such cases are becoming more numerous 
every year. 

But by coming out of trade you have not cleared 
yourself. The trail of the serpent reaches into all 
the lucrative professions and practices of man. 
Each has its own wrongs. [Hach finds a tender 
and very intelligent conscience a disqualification 
for success. Each requires of the practitioner a | 
certain shutting of the eyes, a certain dapperness 
and compliance, an acceptance of customs, a seques- 
tration from the sentiments of generosity and love, 
a compromise of private opinion and lofty integ- 
rity. Nay, the evil custom reaches into the whole 
institution of property, until our laws which estab- 
lish and protect it seem not to be the issue of love 
and reason, but of selfishness. Suppose a man is 
so unhappy as to be born a saint, with keen per- | 
ceptions but with the conscience and love of an an- 
gel, and he is to get his living in the world; he 
finds himself excluded from all lucrative works ; 
he has no farm, and he cannot get one; for to earn | 
money enough to buy one requires a sort of concen- 
tration toward money, which is the selling himself 


224 MAN THE REFORMER. 


\for a number of years, and to him the present hour 
is as sacred and inviolable as any future hour. 
Of course, whilst another man has no land, my 
title to mine, your title to yours, is at once vitiated. 
Inextricable seem to be the twinings and tendrils 
of this evil, and we all involve ourselves in it the 
deeper by forming connections, by wives and chil- 
dren, by benefits and debts. 

Considerations of this kind have turned the at- 
tention of many philanthropic and intelligent per- 
sons to the claims of manual labor, as a part of 
the education of every young man. If the accumu- 
lated wealth of the past generation is thus tainted, 
—no matter how much of it is offered to us, — we 
must begin to consider if it were not the nobler 
part to renounce it, and to put ourselves into pri- 
mary relations with the soil and nature, and ab- 
staining from whatever is dishonest and unclean, 
to take each of us bravely his part, with his own 
hands, in the manual labor of the world. 

But it is said, ‘ What! will you give up the im- 
mense advantages reaped from the division of la- 
bor, and set every man to make his own shoes, bu- 
reau, knife, wagon, sails, and needle? This would 
be to put men back into barbarism by their own 


act.’ 


I see no instant prospect of a virtuous revo- 
lution ; yet I confess I should not be pained at a 


change which threatened a loss of some of the lux- 


MAN THE REFORMER. 220 


uries or conveniences of society, if it proceeded 
froma preference of the agricultural life out of the 
belief that our primary duties as men could be bet- 
ter discharged in that calling. Who could regret 
to see a high conscience and a purer taste exercis- 
ing a sensible effect on young men in their choice 
of occupation, and thinning the ranks of competi- 
tion in the labors of commerce, of law, and of 
state? It is easy to see that the inconvenience 
would last but a short time. This would be great 
action, which always opens the eyes of men. When 
many persons shall have done this, when the major- 
ity shall admit the necessity of reform in all these 
institutions, their abuses will be redressed, and the 
way will be open again to the advantages which 
arise from the division of labor, and a man may se- 
lect the fittest employment for his peculiar talent 
again, without compromise. 

But quite apart from the emphasis which the 
times give to the doctrine that the manual labor of 
society ought to be shared among all the members, 
there are reasons proper to every individual why he 
should not be deprived of it. The use of manual 
labor is one which never grows obsolete, and which 
is inapplicable to no person. _A man should have 
a farm or a mechanical craft for his culture. We 
must have a basis for our higher accomplishments, 
our delicate entertainments of poetry and philoso. | 


926 MAN THE REFORMER. 


phy, in the work of our hands. We must have an 
antagonism in the tough world for all the variety 
of our spiritual faculties, or they will not be born. 
Manual labor is the study of the external world. 
The advantage of riches remains with him who pro- 
cured them, not with the heir. When I go into 
my garden with a spade, and dig a bed, I feel such 
an exhilaration and health that I discover that I 
have been defrauding myself all this time in letting 
others do for me what I should have done with my 
own hands. But not only health, but education is 
in the work. Is it possible that I, who get indefi- 
nite quantities of sugar, hominy, cotton, buckets, 
crockery ware, and letter-paper, by simply signing 
my name once in three months to a cheque in favor 
of John Smith & Co. traders, get the fair share of 
exercise to my faculties by that act which nature 
intended for me in making all these far-fetched 
matters important to my comfort? It is Smith 
himself, and his carriers, and dealers, and manufac- 
turers ; it is the sailor, the hidedrogher, the butcher, 
the negro, the hunter, and the planter, who have 
intercepted the sugar of the sugar, and the cotton 
of the cotton. They have got the education, I only 
the commodity. This were all very well if I were 
necessarily absent, being detained by work of my 
own, like theirs, work of the same faculties; then 
should I be sure of my hands and feet; but now 


MAN THE REFORMER. 227 


I feel some shame before my wood-chopper, my 
ploughman, and my cook, for they have some sort 
of self-sufficiency, they can contrive without my 
aid to bring the day and year round, but I depend 
on them, and have not earned by use a right to my 
arms and feet. 

Consider further the difference between the first \ 
and second owner of property. Every species of | 
property is preyed on by its own enemies, as iron | 
by rust; timber by rot; cloth by moths; provis- 
ions by mould, putridity, or vermin; money by 
thieves ; an orchard by insects; a planted field by 
weeds and the inroad of cattle; a stock of cattle | 
by hunger; a road by rain and frost; a bridge by 
freshets. And whoever takes any of these things 
into his possession, takes the charge of defending 
them from this troop of enemies, or of keeping 
them in repair. A man who supplies his own want, 
who builds a raft or a boat to go a-fishing, finds it 
easy to caulk it, or put in a thole-pin, or mend the 
rudder. What he gets only as fast as he wants for 
his own ends, does not embarrass him, or take away 
his sleep with looking after. But when he comes 
to give all the goods he has year after year collected, 
in one estate to his son, —house, orchard, ploughed 
land, cattle, bridges, hardware, wooden-ware, car- 
pets, cloths, provisions, books, money,— and can- 
not give him the skill and experience which made 


228 MAN THE REFORMER. 


or collected these, and the method and place they 
have in his own life, the son finds his hands full, 
—not to use these things, but to look after them 
and defend them from their natural enemies. To 
him they are not means, but masters. Their ene- 
mies will not remit ; rust, mould, vermin, rain, sun, 
freshet, fire, all seize their own, fill him with vexa- 
tion, and he is converted from the owner into a 
watchman or a watch-dog to this magazine of old 
and new chattels. Whata change! Instead of the 
masterly good humor and sense of power and fertil- 
ity of resource in himself; instead of those strong 
and learned hands, those piercing and learned eyes, 
that supple body, and that mighty and prevailing 
heart which the father had, whom nature loved and 
feared, whom snow and rain, water and land, beast 
and fish seemed all to know and to serve, — we have 
uow a puny, protected person, guarded by walls 
and curtains, stoves and down beds, coaches, and 
men-servants and women-servants from the earth 
and the sky, and who, bred to depend on all these, 
is made anxious by all that endangers those pos- 
sessions, and is forced to spend so much time in 
guarding them, that he has quite lost sight of their 
original use, namely, to help him to his ends, — to 
the prosecution of his love; to the helping of his 
friend, to the worship of his God, to the enlarge- 
ment of his knowledge, to the serving of his coun 


MAN Tit REFORMER. 229 


try, to the indulgence of his sentiment ; and he is 
now what is called a rich man, — the menial and 
runner of his riches. 

Hence it happens that the whole interest of his- 
tory lies in the fortunes of the poor. Knowledge,, 
Virtue, Power are the victories of man over his ne-, 
cessities, his march to the dominion of the world. 
Every man ought to have this opportunity to con-. 
quer the world for himself. Only such persons in- 
terest us, Spartans, Romans, Saracens, English, 
Americans, who have stood in the jaws of need, and. 
have by their own wit and might extricated them- 
selves, and made man victorious. 

I do not wish to overstate this doctrine of labor, 
or insist that every man should be a farmer, any 
more than that every man should be a lexicogra- 
pher. In general one may say that the husband- 
man’s is the oldest and most universal profession, 
and that where a man does not vet discover in him- 
self any fitness for one work more than another, 
this may be preferred. But the doctrine of the 
Farm is merely this, that every man ought to stand 
in primary relations with the work of the world ; 
ought to do it himself, and not to suffer the acci- 
deat of his having a purse in his pocket, or his hav- 
ing been bred to some dishonorable and injurious 
sraft, to sever him from those duties; and for this 
reason, that labor is God’s education ; that he only 


230 MAN THE REFORMER. 


is a sincere learner, he only can become a master, 
who learns the secrets of labor, and who, by real 
cunning extorts from nature its sceptre. 

Neither would I shut my ears to the plea of the 
learned professions, of the poet, the priest, the law- 
giver, and men of study generally; namely, that in 
the experience of all men of that class, the amount 
of manual labor which is necessary to the mainte- 
nance of a family, indisposes and disqualifies for 
intellectual exertion. I know, it often, perhaps’ 
usually happens that where there is a fine organ- 
ization, apt for poetry and philosophy, that individ- 
ual finds himself compelled to wait on his thoughts ; 
to waste several days that he may enhance and glo- 
rify one ; and is better taught by a moderate and 
dainty exercise, such as rambling in the fields, row- 
ing, skating, hunting, than by the downright drudg- 
ery of the farmer and the smith. I would not quite 
forget the venerable counsel of the Egyptian mys- 
teries, which declared that “there were two pairs 
of eyes in man, and it is requisite that the pair 
which are beneath should be closed, when the pair 
that are above them peréeive, and that when the 
pair above are closed, those which are beneath 
should be opened.” Yet I will suggest that no 
separation from labor can be without some loss of 
power and of truth to the seer himself; that, I 
doubt not, the faults and_ vices of our literature and 


TE sem reggae ey car 


MAN THE REFORMER. 231 
philosophy, their too great fineness, effeminacy, and | 


melancholy, are attributable to the enervated and \ 
sickly habits of the literary class. Better that ‘the/ 
book should_not be quite. so good, and_the book-\. 
maker : abler ar and better, and not himself simself often a Iu| 
dierous contrast to-all-that he has writien, 
But granting that for ends so sacred and dear 
some relaxation must be had, I think that if a man 
find in himself any strong bias to poetry, to art, to 
the contemplative life, drawing him to these things 
with a devotion incompatible with good husbandry, — 
that man ought to reckon early with himself, and, 
respecting the compensations of the Universe, ought ° 
to ransom himself from the duties of economy by 
a certain rigor and privation in his habits. For ' 
privileges so rare and grand, let him not stint to/ 
pay a great tax. Let him be a cenobite, a pauper, 
and if need be, celibate also. Let him learn to eat. 
his meals standing, and to relish the taste of fair 
water and black bread. He may leave to others, 
the costly conveniences of housekeeping, and large ) 
hospitality, and the possession of works of art. Let 
him feel that genius is a hospitality, and that he 
who can create works of art needs not collect them. “ 
He must live in a chamber, and postpone his self- 
indulgence, forewarned and forearmed against that 
frequent misfortune of men of genius, — the taste for 
luxury. ‘This is the tragedy of genius ; — attempt- 


232 MAN THE REFORMER. 


‘ing to drive along the ecliptic with one horse of the 
heavens and one horse of the earth, there is only 
diseord and ruin and downfall to chariot and char- 
jioteer. : 

The duty that every man should assume his own 
vows, should call the institutions of society to ac- 
count, and examine their fitness to him, gains in 
emphasis if we look at our modes of living. Is our 
housekeeping sacred and honorable? Does it raise 
and inspire us, or does it cripple us instead? I 
ought to be armed by every part and function of 
my household, by all my social function, by my 
economy, by my feasting, by my voting, by my traf- 
fic. Yet I am almost no party to any of these 
things. Custom does it for me, gives me no power 
therefrom, and runs me in debt to boot. We » spend. 
our incomes for paint and paper, for a , hundred 
trifles, I know not what, and not for the things of — 
a man. Our expense i 1s almost all for conformity. 
It is for cake that we run in debt; it is not the in- 
tellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship, that 
costs so much, Why ‘needs any “man be rich? 

)Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome 
apartments, access to public houses and places of 
‘amusement? Only for want of thought. Give his 
‘mind a new image, and he flees into a solitary gar- 
den or garret to enjoy it, and is richer with that 
‘dream than the fee of a county could make him. 


MAN THE REFORMER. 933 


But we are first thoughtless, and then find that we 
are _moneyless. We are first sensual, and then 
must be-rich. We dare not trust our wit for 
making our house pleasant to our friend, and so we 
buy ice-creams. He is accustomed to carpets, and | 
we have not sufficient character to put floor cloths > 
out of his mind whilst he stays in the house, and so 

we pile the floor with carpets. Let the house rather \ 

be a temple of the Furies of Lacedsemon, formida- | 
ble and holy to all, which none but a Spartan may / 


enter or so much as behold. As soon as there is) 


faith, as soon as there is society, comfits and cush- 
ions will be left to slaves. Expense will be inven- | 
tive and heroic. We shall eat hard and lie hard, 


we shall dwell like the ancient Romans in narrow -: 


tenements, whilst our public edifices, like theirs, will 
be worthy for their proportion of the landscape mm 
which we set them, for conversation, for art, for 
music, for worship. We shall be rich to great pur- 
poses; poor only for selfish ones. 

Now what help for these evils? How can the 
man who has learned but one art, procure all the 
conveniences of life honestly? Shall we say all 
we think ? — Perhaps with his own hands. Sup- 
pose he collects or makes them ill ;— yet he has 
learned their lesson. If he cannot do that? — 
Then perhaps he ean go without. Immense wis- 
dom and riches are in that. It is better to go with- 


934 MAN THE REFORMER. 


out, than to have them at too great a cost. Let us 
learn the meaning of economy. Economy is a 
high, humane office, a sacrament, when its aim is 
grand; when it is the prudence of simple tastes, 
when it is practised for freedom, or love, or devo- 
tion. Much of the economy which we see in houses 
is of a base origin, and is best kept out of sight.’ 
Parched corn eaten to-day, that Wy may have roast, 
fowl to my dinner on Sunday, i is a baseness ; ; but 
parched corn and a house with one apartment, that 
I may be free of all perturbations, that I may be | 
serene and docile to what the mind shall speak, 
and girt and road-ready for the lowest mission of 
knowledge or goodwill, is frugality for gods and _ 
__heroes. | 

Can we not learn the lesson of self-help? So- 
ciety is full of infirm people, who incessantly sum- 
mon others to serve them. They contrive every- 
where to exhaust for their single comfort the entire 
means and appliances of that luxury to which our 
invention has yet attained. Sofas, ottomans, stoves, 
‘Awine, game-fowl, spices, perfumes, rides, the the- 
lea entertainments, —all these they want, they 
‘need, and whatever can be suggested more than 
these they crave also, as if it was the bread which 
should keep them from starving; and if they miss 
any one, they represent themselves as the most 
‘wronged and most wretched persons on earth. 


MAN THE REFORMER. Zo) 


One must have been born and bred with them to 
know how to prepare a meal for their learned | 
stomach. Meantime they never bestir themselves | 
to serve another person; not they! they have a 
great deal more to do for themselves than they can 
possibly perform, nor do they once perceive the 
cruel joke of their lives, but the more odious they 
grow, the sharper is the tone of their complaining 
and craving. Can anything be so elegant as to, 
have few wants and to serve them one’s self, so as| 
to have somewhat left to give, instead of being al-\ 
ways prompt to grab? It is more elegant to an- \ 
swer one’s own needs than to be richly served ; in- 
elegant perhaps it may look to-day, and to a few, 
but it is an elegance forever and to all. 

I do not wish to be absurd and pedantic in re- 
form. Ido not wish to push my criticism on the 
state of things around me to that extravagant 
mark that shall compel me to suicide, or to an ab- 
solute isolation from the advantages of civil so- 
ciety. If we suddenly plant our foot and say, — I 
will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any 
food or fabric which I do not know to be innocent, 
or deal with any person whose whole manner of 
life is not clear and rational, we shall stand still. 
Whose is‘so?. Not mine; not thine; not his. But 
I think we must clear ourselves each one by the in- 
terrogation, whether we have earned our bread to- 


236 MAN THE REFORMER. 


day by the hearty contribution of our energies to 
the common benefit; and we must not cease to 
tend to the correction of flagrant wrongs, by lay- 
ing one stone aright every day. 

But the idea which now begins to agitate society 
has a wider scope than our daily employments, our 
households, and the institutions of property. We 
are to revise the whole of our social structure, the 
State, the school, religion, marriage, trade, science, 
and explore their foundations in our own nature ; 
we are to see that the world not only fitted the 
former men, but fits us, and to clear ourselves of 
every usage which has not its roots in our own 
mind. What isa man born for but to be a Re- 
former, a Re-maker of what man has made; a re- 
nouncer of lies; a restorer of truth and good, imi- 
tating that great Nature which embosoms us all, 
and which sleeps no moment on an old past, but 
every hour repairs herself, yielding us every morn-— 
ing a new day, and with every pulsation a new 
life? Let him renounce everything which is not 
true to him, and put all his practices back on their 
first thoughts, and do nothing for which he has not 
the whole world for his reason. If there are in- 
conveniences and what is called ruin in the way, 
because we have so enervated and-maimed our- 
selves, yet it would be like dying of perfumes to 
sink in the effort to re-attach the deeds of every 
day to the holy and mysterious recesses of life. 


MAN THE REFORMER. 937 


The power which is at once spring and regulator 
in all efforts of reform is the conviction that there 
is an infinite worthiness in man, which will appear 
at the call of worth, and that all particular reforms 
are the removing of some impediment. Is it not 


the highest duty that man should be honored in us? 


I ought not to allow any man, because he has broad}- 
lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. t) 
ought to make him feel that I can do without his | 
riches, that I cannot be bought, — neither by com- | 
fort, neither by pr pride, —and though I be utterly, 
penniless, and receiving bread from him, that he is: 
—__ the_poor man beside me. ‘And if, at the same time, ). 
a woman or a child discovers a sentiment of piety, 
‘or a juster way of thinking than mine, I ought to, 
confess it by my respect and obedience, atolee it) 
go to alter my whole way of life. ‘ 
The Americans have many virtues, but they 
have not Faith and Hope. I know no two words 
whose meaning is more lost sight of. We use 
these words as if they were as obsolete as Selah 
and Amen. And yet they have the broadest mean- 
ing, and the most cogent application to Boston in 
this year. The Americans have little faith. They : 
rely on the power of a dollar ; they are deaf to av 
sentiment. They think you may talk the north 
wind down as easily as raise society; and no Giass 
more faithless than the scholars or intellectual men. 


938 MAN THE REFORMER. 


Now if I talk with a sincere wise man, and my 
friend, with a poet, with a conscientious youth 
who is still under the dominion of his own wild 
thoughts, and not yet harnessed in the team of so- 
ciety to drag with us all in the ruts of custom, I 
see at once how paltry is all this generation of un- 
believers, and what a house of cards their institu- 
tions are, and I see what one brave man, what one 
great thought executed might effect. I see that 
the reason of the distrust of the practical man in 
all theory, is his inability to perceive the means 
whereby we work. Look, he says, at the tools with 
which this world of yours is to be built. As we 
cannot make a planet, with atmosphere, rivers, and 
forests, by means of the best carpenters’ or engi- 
neers’ tools, with chemist’s laboratory and smith’s 
forge to boot, —so neither can we ever construct 
that heavenly society you prate of out of foolish, 
sick, selfish men and women, such as we know 
themto be. But the believer not only beholds his 
\ heaven to be possible, but already to begin to ex- 
ist, —not by the men or materials the statesman 
‘uses, but by men transfigured and raised above 
_ themselves by the power of principles. To princi- 
\ples something else is possible that transcends all 
/the power of expedients. 

Every great and commanding moment in the an- 
nals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm. 


MAN THE REFORMER. 239 


\ 


The victories of the Arabs after Mahomet, who, in a\ 
few years, from a small and mean beginning, estab- 
lished a larger empire than that of Rome, is an ex- 
ample. They did they knew not what. The naked 
Derar, horsed on an idea, was found an overmatch 
for a troop of Roman cavalry. The women fought 
like men, and conquered the Roman men. They 
were miserably equipped, miserably fed. They were 
Temperance troops. There was neither brandy nor 
flesh needed to feed them. They conquered Asia, 
and Africa, and Spain, on barley. The Caliph 
Omar’s walking-stick struck more terror into those 
who saw it than another man’s sword. His diet 
was barley bread; his sauce was salt; and often- 
times by way of abstinence he ate his bread with- 
out salt. His drink was water. His palace was 
built of mud; and when he left Medina to go to 
the conquest of Jerusalem, he rode on a red camel, 
with a wooden platter hanging at his saddle, with a / 
bottle of water and two sacks, one holding barley,/ 
and the other dried fruits. / 
But there will dawn ere long on our politics, on | 
our modes of living, a nobler morning than that Ara- | 
bian faith, in the sentiment of Jove. This is the; 
one one remedy for all ills, d the’ panacea. of nature. We) 
must t be lovers, and at. at once the impossible becomes 
possible. Our age and history, for these thousand’ 
years, h has not been the history of kindness, but 


——— 


940 MAN THE REFORMER. 


of selfishness. Our distrust is very expensive. The 
money we spend for courts and prisons is very ill 
laid out. We make, by distrust, the thief, and 
burglar, and incendiary, and by our court and jail 
we keep him so. An acceptance of the sentiment 


(of love throughout Christendom for a season would 


bring the felon and the outcast to our side in tears, 
with the devotion of his faculties to our service. 
See this wide society of laboring men and women. 
We allow ourselves to be served by them, we live 
apart from them, and meet them without a salute 
in the streets. We do not greet their talents, nor 
rejoice in their good fortune, nor foster their hopes, 
nor in the assembly of the people vote for what is 
dear to them. Thus we enact the part of the self- 
ish noble and king from the foundation of the 
world. See, this tree always bears one fruit. In 
every household, the peace of a pair is poisoned by 
the malice, slyness, indolence, and alienation of do- 
mestics. Let any two matrons meet, and observe 
how soon their conversation turns on the troubles 
from their “ help,” as our phrase is. In every 
knot of laborers the rich man does not feel himself 
among his friends, — and at the polls he finds them 
arrayed in a mass in distinct opposition to him. 
We complain that the politics of masses of the 
people are controlled by designing men, and led in 
opposition to manifest justice and the common 


MAN THE REFORMER. 941 


weal, and to their own interest. But the people 
do not wish to be represented or ruled by the igno- 
rant and base. They only vote for these, because 
they were asked with the voice and semblance of 
kindness. They will not vote for them long. They 
inevitably prefer wit and probity. To use an Egyp- 
tian metaphor, it is not their will for any long time 
“to raise the nails of wild beasts, and to depress} / 
the heads of the sacred birds.” Let our affection i 
flow out to our fellows; it would operate in a day)’ 
the greatest of all revolutions. It is better to work_ 
on institutions by the sun than by the wind. The} 


8 


State must consider the poor man, and all voices) 
must speak for him. Every child that is born 
must have a just chance for his bread. Let the’) 
amelioration in our laws of property proceed from S : 
the concession of the rich, not from the grasping of ( 
the poor. Let us begin by habitual imparting. ~ 
Let us understand that the equitable rule is, that 
no one should take more than his share, let him ha 
be ever so rich. Let me feel that I am to be: 
a lover. I am to see to it that the world is 
the better for me, and to find my reward in the 
act. Love would put a new face on this weary old 
world in which we dwell as pagans and enemies too 
long, and it would warm the heart to see how fast 
the vain diplomacy of statesmen, the impotence of 


armies, and navies, and lines of defence, would be 
VOL. I. 16 


242 MAN THE REFORMER. 


superseded by this unarmed child. Love will creep 
where it cannot go, will accomplish that by imper- 
ceptible methods, — being its own lever, fulcrum, 
and power, — which force could never achieve. 
Have you not seen in the woods, in a late autumn 
morning, a poor fungus or mushroom, —a plant 
without any solidity, nay, that seemed nothing but 
a soft mush or jelly, — by its constant, total, and 
inconceivably gentle pushing, manage to break its 
way up through the frosty ground, and actually to 
lift a hard crust on its head? It is the symbol of 
the power of kindness. The virtue of this principle 
in human society in application to great interests is 
obsolete and forgotten. Once or twice in history 
it has been tried in illustrious instances, with sig- 
nal success. This great, overgrown, dead Chris- 


‘tendom of ours still keeps alive at least the name 


of a lover of mankind. But one day all men will be 
lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the 
universal sunshine. 

Will you suffer me to add one trait more to this 
portrait of man the reformer? The mediator be- 
tween the spiritual and the actual world should 
have a great prospective prudence. An Arabian 
poet describes his hero by saying, 


\“ Sunshine was he 

( In the winter day ; 

| ( And in the midsummer 
_| Coolness and shade.” 


MAN THE REFORMER. 243 


He who would help himself and others should not 
be a subject of irregular and interrupted impulses 
of virtue, but a continent, persisting, immovable 
person, — such as we have seen a few scattered up 
and down in time for the blessing of the world ; 
men who have in the gravity of their nature a qual- 
ity which answers to the fly-wheel in a mill, which 
distributes the motion equably over all the wheels 
and hinders it from falling unequally and suddenly 
in destructive shocks. It is better that joy should\ 
be spread over all the day in the form of strength, 
than that it should be-concentrated into ecstasies, | 
full of danger and followed by reactions. There is. 
a sublime prudence which is the very highest that 
we know of man, which, believing in a vast future, 
— sure of more to come than is yet seen, — post- 
pones always the present hour to the whole life ; 
postpones talent to genius, and special results to 
character. As the merchant gladly takes money 
from his income to add to his capital, so is the great 
man very willing to lose particular powers and tal- 
ents, so that he gain in the elevation of his life. 
The opening of the spiritual senses disposes men 
ever to greater sacrifices, to leave their signal tal- 
ents, their best means and skill of procuring a pres- 
ent success, their power and their fame, — to cast 
all things behind, in the insatiable thirst for divine 
communications. A purer fame, a greater power 


244 MAN THE REFORMER. 


rewards the sacrifice. It isthe conversion of our 
-harvest into seed. As the farmer casts into the 
\ground the finest ears of his grain, the time will 
‘come when we too shall hold nothing back, but 
‘shall eagerly convert more than we now possess 
| into means and powers, when we shall be willing to 
‘sow the sun and the moon for seeds. 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


READ AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, DECEMBER 2, 1841. 





LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 





+ 


THe Times, as we say — or the present aspects 
of our social state, the Laws, Divinity, Natural Sci- 
ence, Agriculture, Art, Trade, Letters, have their 
root in an invisible spiritual reality. To appear 
in these aspects, they must first exist, or have some 
necessary foundation. Beside all the small reasons 
we assign, there is a great reason for the existence 
of every extant fact; a reason which lies grand and 
immovable, often unsuspected, behind it in silence. 
The Times are the masquerade of the Eternities >) 
trivial to the dull, tokens of noble and majestic | 
agents to the wise; the receptacle in which the/ 
Past leaves its history; the quarry out of which 
the genius of to-day is building up the Future./ 
The Times — the nations, manners, institutions, 
opinions, votes, are to be studied as omens, as sa- 
cred leaves, whereon a weighty sense is inscribed, 
if we have the wit and the love to search it out. 
Nature itself seems to propound to us this topic, 
and to invite us to explore the meaning of the con- 
spicuous facts of the day. Everything that is pop- 


248 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


ular, it has been said, deserves the attention of the 

i Pcinopher! and this for the obvious reason, t that 
although it may not be of any worth in itself, yet 
it characterizes the people. 

Here is very good matter to be handled, if we 
are skilful; an abundance of important practical 
questions which it behooves us to understand. 
Let us examine the pretensions of the attacking 
and defending parties. Here is this great fact of 
Conservatism, entrenched in its immense redoubts, 
-with Himmaleh for its front, and Atlas for its 
flank, and Andes for its rear, and the Atlantic and 
Pacific seas for its ditches and trenches ; which has 
| planted its crosses, and crescents, and stars and 
| stripes, and various signs and badges of possession, 
over every rood of the planet, and says, ‘I will 
hold fast; and to whom I will, will I give; and 
whom I will, will I exclude and starve:’ so says 

/ Conservatism; and all the children of men attack 
\ the colossus in their youth, and all, or all but a 
\few, bow before it when they are old. A necessity 
not yet commanded, a negative imposed on the 
will of man by his condition, a deficiency in his 
force, is the foundation on which it rests. Let 
this side be fairly stated. Meantime, on the other 
part, arises Reform, and offers the sentiment of 
Love as an overmatch to this material might. I 
wish to consider well this affirmative side, which 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 249 


has a loftier port and reason than heretofore, which 
encroaches on the other every day, puts it out of 
countenance, out of reason, and out of temper, and 
leaves it nothing but silence and possession. 

The fact of aristocracy, with its two weapons of 
wealth and manners, is as commanding a feature of 
the nineteenth century and the American republic 
as of old Rome, or modern England. The reason 
and influence of wealth, the aspect of philosophy 
and religion, and the tendencies which have ac- 
quired the name of Transcendentalism in Old and 
New England; the aspect of poetry, as the expo- 
nent and interpretation of these things; the fuller 
development and the freer play of Character as a 
social and political agent ; — these and other related 
topics will in turn come to be considered. 

But the subject of the Times is not an abstract 
question. We talk of the world, but we meana 
few men and women. If you speak of the age, you 
mean your own platoon of people, as Dante and 
Milton painted in colossal their platoons, and called 
them Heaven and Hell. In our. idea of progress, 
we do not go out of this personal picture. We de 
not think the sky will be bluer, or honey sweeter, 
or our climate more temperate, but only that our 


relation to our fellows will be simpler and happier.. | 


What is the reason to be given for this extreme at- 
traction which persons have for us, but that they 


250 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


are the Age? they are the results of the Past; 
they are the heralds of the Future. They indicate, 
— these witty, suffering, blushing, intimidating fig- 
ures of the only race in which there are individuals 
or changes, how far on the Fate has gone, and what 
it drives at. As trees make scenery, and consti- 
tute the hospitality of the landscape, so persons are 
the world to persons. A cunning mystery by which 
the Great Desert of thoughts and of planets takes 
this engaging form, to bring, as it would seem, its 
meanings nearer to the mind. Thoughts walk and 
speak, and look with eyes at me, and transport me 
into new and magnificent scenes. These are the 
pungent instructors who thrill the heart of each of 
us, and make all other teaching formal and cold. 
How I follow them with aching heart, with pining 
desire! I count myself nothing before them. I 
would die for them with joy. They can do what 
they will with me. How they lash us with those 
tongues! How they make the tears start, make us 
blush and turn pale, and lap us in Elysium to sooth- 
ing dreams and castles in the air! By tones of 
triumph, of dear love, by threats, by pride that 
freezes, these have the skill to make the world look 
bleak and inhospitable, or seem the nest of tender- 
ness and joy. I do not wonder at the miracles 
_ which poetry attributes to the music of Orpheus, 


when I remember what I have experienced from 


2 
3 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 951 


the varied notes of the human voice. They are an 
incalculable energy which countervails all other 
forces in nature, because they are the channel of 
supernatural powers. There is no interest or insti- 


man could be born into it, he would immediately | | 
redeem and replace it. A personal ey -— 
trenalory some years. ‘ago, “somebody sHueliod a circle 
of friends of order here in Boston, who supposed 
that our people were identified with their religious 


\| 
tution so poor and withered, but_if a new strong) 


denominations, by declaring that an eloquent man, | 


— let him be of what sect soever, — would be or- 
dained at once in one of our metropolitan churches. 
To be sure he would; and not only in ours but in 


any church, mosque, or temple, on the planet ; but | 
he must be eloquent, able to supplant our method \ 


and classification by the superior beauty of his own. 


Every fact we have was brought here by some per- ; 
son; and there is none that will not change and, | 
pass away before a person whose nature is broader \ 


fe 


than the person which the fact in question repre- | 


sents. And so I find the Age walking about in 


happy and hopeful natures, in strong eyes and pleas- 
ant thoughts, and think I read it nearer and truer 
so, than in the statute-book, or in the investments 
of capital, which rather celebrate with mournful 
music the obsequies of the last age. In the brain of a 


259, LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


fanatic ; in the wild hope of a mountain boy, called 
by city boys very ignorant, because they do not 
know what his hope has certainly apprised him shall 
be; in the love-glance of a girl; in the hair-splitting 
conscientiousness of some eccentric person who has 
found some new scruple to embarrass himself and 
his neighbors withal is to be found that which shall 
constitute the times to come, more than in the now 
organized and accredited oracles. For whatever is 
affirmative and now advancing, contains it. J think 
‘that only is real which men love and rejoice in; 
ot what they tolerate, but what they choose ; what 
they embrace and avow, and not the things which 
chill, benumb, and terrify them. 

_ And so why not draw for these times a portrait 
fallery? Let us paint the painters. Whilst the 
‘Daguerreotypist, with camera-obseura and_ silver 
plate, begins now to traverse the land, let us set up 
our Camera also, and let the sun paint the people. 
Let us paint the agitator, and the man of the old 
school, and the member of Congress, and the col- 
lege-professor, the formidable editor, the priest and 
reformer, the contemplative girl, and the fair as- 
pirant for fashion and opportunities, the woman of 
the world who has tried and knows ;— let us ex- 
amine how well she knows. Could we indicate the 
indicators, indicate those who most accurately rep- 
resent every good and evil tendency of the general 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 955 


mind, in the just order which they take on this can- 
vas of Time, so that all witnesses should recog: 
nize a spiritual law as each well known form flitted 
for a moment across the wall, we should have a 
series of sketches which would report to the next 
ages the color and quality of ours. 

Certainly I think if this were done there would 
be much to admire as well as to condemn; souls 
of as lofty a port as any in Greek or Roman fame 
might appear; men of great heart, of strong hand, 
and of persuasive speech ; subtle thinkers, and men 
of wide sympathy, and an apprehension which looks 
over all history and everywhere recognizes its own. 
To be sure, there will be fragments and hints of 
men, more than enough: bloated promises, which 
end in nothing or little. * And then truly great 
men, but with some defect in their composition 
which neutralizes their whole force. Here is a. 
Damascus blade, such as you may search through| 
nature in vain to parallel, laid up on the shelf in| 
some village to rust and ruin. And how many 
seem not quite available for that idea which they 
represent? Now and then comes a bolder spirit, I 
should rather say, a more surrendered soul, more 
informed and led by God, which is much in ad- 
vance of the rest, quite beyond their sympathy, but 
predicts what shall soon be the general fulness ; as 
when we stand by the seashore, whilst the tide is 


254. LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


coming in, a wave comes up the beach far higher 
than any foregoing one, and recedes; and for a 
long while none comes up to that mark; but after 
some time the whole sea is there and beyond it. 
But we are not permitted to stand as spectators 
of the pageant which the times exhibit; we are 
parties also, and have a responsibility which is not 
to be declined. <A little while this interval of won- 
der and comparison is permitted us, but to the end 
that we shall play a manly part. As the solar sys- 
tem moves forward in the heavens, certain stars 
open before us, and certain stars close up behind us; 
so is man’s life. The reputations that were great 
and inaccessible change and tarnish. How great 
were once Lord Bacon’s dimensions! he is now 
reduced almost to the middle height; and many 
another star has turned out to be a planet or an as- 
teroid: only a few are the fixed stars which have 
no parallax,.or none for us. The change and de- 
cline of old reputations are the gracious marks of 
our own growth. Slowly, like light of morning, it 
steals on us, the new fact, that we who were pupils 
or aspirants are now society : do compose a portion 
of that head and heart we are wont to think worthy 
of all reverence and heed. We are the represen- 
tatives of religion and intellect, and stand in the 
light of Ideas, whose rays stream through us to 
those younger and more in the dark. What further 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 955 


relations we sustain; what new lodges we are enter- 

ing, is now unknown. .To-day is a king in. disguise. 
To-day always looks mean to the thoughtless, in the 

face of an uniform experience that all good and | 
great and happy actions are made up precisely of 

these blank to-days. Let us not be so deceived. | 
Let us unmask the king as he passes. Let us not 
inhabit times of wonderful and various “promise | 
without divining their tendency. Let us not see 

the foundations of nations, and of a new and better 

order of things laid, with roving eyes, and an at- 

tention preoccupied with trifles. 

The two omnipresent parties of History, the / 
party of the Past and the party of the Future, ail 
vide society to-day as of old. Here is the innumer- 
able multitude of those who accept the state and 
the church from the last generation, and stand on 
no argument but possession. They have reason 
also, and, as I think, better reason than is com- 
monly stated. No Burke, no Metternich has yet 
done full justice to the side of conservatism. But 
this class, however large, relying not on the intel- 
lect but on the instinct, blends itself with the brute 
forces of nature, is respectable only as nature is; but 
the individuals have no attraction for us. It is the 
dissenter, the theorist, the aspirant, who is quitting 
this ancient domain to embark on seas of adven- 
ture, who engages our interest. Omitting then for 


eg 


> 


956 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


the present all notice of the stationary class, we 
shall find that the movement party divides itself 


~ into two classes, the actors, and the students. 


The actors constitute that great army of martyrs 


| who, at least in America, by their conscience and 
philanthropy, occupy the ground which Calvinism 


occupied in the last age, and compose the visible 
church of the existing generation. The present 
age will be marked by its harvest of projects for 
the reform of domestic, civil, literary, and ecclesi- 
astical institutions. The leaders of the crusades 
against War, Negro slavery, Intemperance, Govern- 
ment based on force, Usages of trade, Court and 


_ Custom-house Oaths, and so on to the agitators on 


the system of Education and the laws of Property, 
are the right successors of Luther, Knox, Robin- 
son, Fox, Penn, Wesley, and Whitfield. They 
have the same virtues and vices; the same noble 
impulse, and the same bigotry. These movements 
are on all accounts important ; they not only check 
the special abuses, but they educate the conscience 
and the intellect of the people. How can such a 


question as the Slave-trade be agitated for forty 


‘years by all the Christian nations, without throw- 
/ ing great light on ethics into the general mind? 
\The fury with which the slave-trader defends every 


© inch of his bloody deck and his howling auction- 


platform, is a trumpet to alarm the ear of mankind, 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 25T 


to wake the dull, and drive all neutrals to take) 
sides and to listen to the argument and the verdict. \ 


The Temperance-question, which rides the conver-\, 


sation of ten thousand circles, and is tacitly recalled 


at every public and at every private table, drawing: - be: 
with it all the curious ethics of the Pledge, of the \ , on bs 
Wine-question, of the equity of the manufacture | 4 : f 
and the trade, is a gymnastic training to the cas. | 6 


uistry and conscience of the time. Anti-masonry, 
had a deep right and wrong, which gradually 
emerged to sight out of the turbid controversy. 
The political questions touching the Banks; the 


Tariff; the limits of the executive power ; the right . 


of the constituent to instruct the representative ; 
the treatment of the Indians; the Boundary wars ; 
the Congress of nations; are all pregnant with 
ethical conclusions; and it is well if government 
and our social order can extricate themselves from 
these alembics and find themselves still government 
and social order. ‘The student of history will here- 
after compute the singular value of our endless 
discussion of questions to the mind of the period. 


Whilst each of these aspirations and attempts of | %, 


the people for the Better is magnified by the nat-/ 


ural exaggeration of its advocates, until it excludes } > | 
the others from sight, and repels discreet persons | 
by the unfairness of the plea, the movements are 


in reality all parts of one movement. There is a 
VOL. I. 1’ 


258 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


Died chain, — see it, or see it not,— of reforms 
emerging from the surrounding darkness, each 
‘cherishing some part of the general idea, and all 
must be seen in order to do justice to any one. 
)Seen in this their natural connection, they are sub- 
) lime. The conscience of the Age demonstrates it- 
self in this effort to raise the life of man by putting 
it in harmony with his idea of the Beautiful and 
‘the Just. The ee of reform is always identi- 
cal, it is the comparison of the idea with the_fact. 
Our modes of living are not “agreeable: to our imag- 
ination. We suspect they are unworthy. We ar- 
raign our daily employments. They appear to us 
unfit, unworthy of the faculties we spend on them. 
In conversation with a wise man, we find ourselves 
apologizing for our employments ; we speak of 
them with shame. Nature, literature, science, 
childhood, appear to us beautiful; but not our own 
daily work, not the ripe fruit and considered labors 
,of man. This beauty which the fancy finds in 
everything else, certainly accuses the manner of 
life we lead. Why should it be hateful? Why 
should it contrast thus with all natural beauty ? 
Why should it not be poetic, and invite and raise 
us? Is there a necessity that the works of man 
should be sordid? Perhaps not. — Out of this fair 
__ Idea in the mind springs the effort at the Perfect. 
It is the interior testimony to a fairer possibility of 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 259 


life and manners which agitates society every day 
with the offer of some new amendment. If we, 
would make more strict inquiry concerning its ori- 
gin, we find ourselves rapidly approaching the in: 
ner boundaries of thought, that term where speech. 
becomes silence, and science conscience. For the | 
origin of all reform is in that mysterious fountain ( 
of the moral sentiment in man, which, amidst the , 
natural, ever contains the supernatural for men. } 
That is new and creative. That is alive. That ; 
alone can make a man other than he is. Here or | 
nowhere resides unbounded energy, unbounded — 
power. 

The new voices in the wilderness erying “ Re- 
pent,” have revived a hope, which had well-nigh 
perished out of the world, that the thoughts of the’ 
mind may yet, in some distant age, in some happy 


hour, be executed by the hands. That is the hope, 
of which all other hopes are parts. For some ages, 
these ideas have been consigned to the poet and 
musical composer, to the prayers and the sermons 
of churches; but the thought that they can ever 
have any footing in real life, seems long since to 
have been exploded by all judicious persons. Mil- 
ton, in his best tract, describes a relation between 
religion and the daily occupations, which is true 
until this time. 

“A wealthy man, addicted to bis pleasure and 


_ 


260 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


‘to his profits, finds religion to be a traffic so en- 
tangled, and of so many piddling accounts, that 
of all mysteries he cannot skill to keep a stock go- 
ing upon that trade. What should he do? Fain 
he would have the name to be religious; fain he 
would bear up with his neighbors in that. What 
does he therefore, but resolve to give over toiling, 
and to find himself out some factor, to whose care 
and credit he may commit the whole managing of 
his religious affairs; some divine of note and estima- 
tion that must be. To him he adheres, resigns the 
whole warehouse of his religion, with all the locks 
and keys, into his custody ; and indeed makes the 
very person of that man his religion; esteems his 
associating with him a sufficient evidence and com- 
mendatory of his own piety. So that a man may 
say his religion is now no more within himself, but 
is become a dividual moveeble, and goes and comes 
near him, according as that good man frequents 
the house. He entertains him, gives him gifts, 
feasts him, lodges him ; his religion comes home at 
night, prays, is liberally supped, and sumptuously 
laid to sleep; rises, is saluted, and after the malm- 
sey, or some well spiced bruage, and better break- 
fasted than he whose morning appetite would have 

| gladly fed on green figs between Bethany and Je- 

| rusalem, his religion walks abroad at eight, and 
| leaves his kind entertainer in the shop, trading all 

\ day without his religion.” 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 261 


This picture would serve for our times. Relig- 
ion was not invited to eat or drink or sleep with us, 
or to make or divide an estate, but was a holiday 
guest. Such omissions judge the church; as the, 
compromise made with the slaveholder, not much! / 
noticed at first, every day appears more flagrant. 
mischief to the American constitution. But now 
the purists are looking into all these matters. The 
more intelligent are growing uneasy on the subject 
of Marriage. They wish to see the character re-\ 
presented also in that covenant. There shall be) 
nothing brutal in it, but it shall honor the man and \ 
the woman, as much as the most diffusive and uni-\ 
versal action. Grimly the same spirit looks into» 
the law of Property, and accuses men of driving a5. 
trade in the great boundless providence which had ?\ 
given the air, the water, and the land to men, to ( : 
use and not to fence in and monopolize. It casts 
its eye on Trade, and Day Labor, and so it goes up 
and down, paving the earth with eyes, destroying 
privacy and making thorough-lights. Is all this for 
nothing ? Do you suppose that the reforms which 
are preparing will be as superficial as those we 
know ? 

By the books it reads and translates, julge what 
books it will presently print. <A great deal of the 
profoundest thinking of antiquity, which had be- 
come as good as obsolete for us, is now re-appear- 


262 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


ing in extracts and allusions, and in twenty years 
will get all printed anew. See how daring is the 
reading, the speculation, the experimenting of the 
time. If now some genius shall arise who could 
unite these scattered rays! And always such a 
genius does embody the ideas of each time. Here 
is great variety and richness of mysticism, each 
part of which now only disgusts whilst it forms 
the sole thought of some poor Perfectionist or 
“Comer out,” yet when it shall be taken up as the 
garniture of some profound and _ all-reconciling 
thinker, will appear the rich and appropriate decor- 
ation of his robes. 
These reforms are our contemporaries; they are 
/ | | onrselves ; ; our own light, and sight, and conscience ; 
|they only name the relation which subsists between 
us and the vicious institutions which they go to rec- 
'tify. They are the simplest statements of man in 
these matters; the plain right and wrong. I can- 
not choose but allow and honor them. The impulse 
is good, and the theory ; the practice is less beauti- 
ful. The Reformers affirm the inward life, but 
they do not trust it, but use outward and vulgar 
means. They do not rely on precisely that strength 
‘which wins me to their cause ; not on love, not on 
a principle, but on men, on multitudes, on cireum- 
)stances, on money, on party ; that is, on fear, on 
‘wrath, and pride. The love which lifted men to 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 263 


the sight of these better ends was the true and best 
distinction of this time, the disposition to trust a 
principle more than a material force. I think that 
the soul of reform ; the conviction that not sensual- 
ism, not slavery, not war, not imprisonment, not 
even government, are needed, — but in lieu of them 
all, reliance on the sentiment of man, which will 
work best the more it is trusted; not reliance on. 
numbers, but, contrariwise, distrust of numbers and 
the feeling that then are we strongest when most 
private and alone. The young men who have been 
vexing society for these last years with regenerative 
methods seem to have made this mistake; they all | 
exaggerated some special means, and all failed to 


see that the Reform of Reforms must be accom- /. 
plished A arama ‘ 
The Reforms have their high origin in an ideal 
justice, but they do not retain the purity of an idea. 
They are quickly organized in some low, inadequate. 
form, and present no more poetic image to the 
mind than the evil tradition which they reprobated. 
They mix the fire of the moral sentiment with per- 
sonal and party heats, with measureless exaggera-| 
tions, and the blindness that prefers some darling} 
measure to justice and truth. Those who are urg-)) 


ing with most ardor what are called the ereatest 1 


benefits of mankind, are narrow, self-pleasing, con-) | 
ceited men, and affect us as the insane do. They 


264 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


bite us, and werun mad also. I think the work of 
{the reformer as innocent as other work that is done 


pasar him; but when I have seen it near, I do 


\not like it better. It is done in the same way, it 
/ se <= — ~~ TTT 


is done profanely, not piously ; by management, by 
tactics and clamor. It_is a buzz in the ear. I 
cannot feel any pleasure in sacrifices which display 
_to me such partiality of character. We do not 
want actions, but men; not a chemical drop of wa- 
ter, but rain; the spirit that sheds and showers ac- 
tions, countless, endléss actions. You have on some 
occasion played a bold part. You have set your 
heart and face against society when you thought it 
wrong, and returned it frown for frown. Ixcel- 
(lent : now can you afford to forget it, reckoning all 
\ your action no more than the passing of your hand 
‘through the air, or a little breath of your mouth ? 
'The world leaves no track in space, and the great- 
est action of man no mark in the vast idea. To 
the youth diffident of his ability and full of com- 
punction at his unprofitable existence, the tempta- 
tion is always great to lend himself to public move- 
ments, and as one of a party accomplish what he 
cannot hope to effect alone. But he must resist 
the degradation of a man to a measure. I must 
get with truth, though I should never come to act, 


ie 


‘J,as you call it, with effect. I must consent to inac- 
tion. A patience which is grand; a brave and cold 


oa 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 265 


neglect of the offices which prudence exacts, so it 
be done in a deep upper piety ; a consent to soli-\ 
tude and inaction which proceeds out of an unwill- ) 
ingness to violate character, is the century which’ 
makes the gem. Whilst therefore I desire to ex- 
press the respect and joy I feel before this sublime 
connection of reforms now in their infancy around 
us, I urge the more earnestly the paramount duties 
of self-reliance. I cannot find language of suffi- 
cient energy to convey my sense of the sacredness | 
of private integrity. All men, all things, the state, 
the church, yea the friends of the heart are phan- 
tasms and unreal beside the sanctuary of the heart. 
With so much awe, with so much fear, let it be re- 
spected. 

| The great majority of men, unable to judge of 
“ any principle until its light falls on a fact, are not || 


- / © aware of the evil that is around them until they , 


“ see itn some gross form, as in a class of intemper- 
*) ate men, or slaveholders, or soldiers, or fraudulent. 


1 ‘ “| persons. Then they are greatly moved ; and mag- ( 
~~ nifying the importance of that wrong, they fancy $ 


that if that abuse were redressed all would go well, ° 
and they fill the land with clamor to correct it. 

Hence the missionary, and other religious efforts. _ 
If every island and every house had a Bible, if? Ms ay pu 


every child was brought into the Sunday School, Lg t 
would the wounds of the world heal, and mar be! @¢:., 


3 
Rm f 
& é 


; > 


upright ? 


266 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


But the man of ideas, accounting the circum- 
stance nothing, judges of the commonwealth from 
the state of his own mind. ‘If, he says, ‘I am. 
selfish, then is there slavery, or the effort to estab- 
lish it, whereverI go. But if I am just, then is 
there no slavery, let the laws say what they will. 
For if I treat all men as gods, how to me can there 
be any such thing as a slave?’ But how frivolous 
is your war against circumstances. This denounc- 
ing philanthropist is himself a slaveholder in every 
word and look. Does he free me? Does he cheer 
me? He is the state of Georgia, or Alabama, with 

[their sanguinary slave-laws, walking here on our 
‘northeastern shores. We are all thankful he has 
no more political power, as we are fond of liberty 
ourselves. [am afraid our virtue_ is_a little geo-_ 
graphical. I am not mortified by our vice; that is 
obduracy; it colors and palters, it curses and 
swears, and I can see to the end of it; but I own 
our virtue.makes me ashamed ; so sour_and narrow, 
so thin and blind, virtue so vice-like. Then again, 
how trivial seem the contests of the abolitionist, — 
whilst he aims merely at the circumstance of the 
slave. Give the slave the least elevation of relig- 
ious sentiment, and he is no slave; you are the 
slave ; he not only in his humility feels his superior- 
ity, feels that much deplored condition of his to be 
a fading trifle, but he makes you feel it too. He is 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 267 


the master. The exaggeration which our young 
people make of his wrongs, characterizes them- 
selves. What are no trifles to them, they naturally 
think are no trifles to Pompey. 

We say then that the reforming movement is 
sacred in its origin ; in its management and details, \ 
timid and profane. These benefactors hope to 
raise man by improving his circumstances: by com- 
bination of that which is dead they hope to make 
something alive. In vain. By new infusions alone 
of the spirit by which he is made and directed, can 
he be re-made and reinforced. The sad Pestalozzi, 
who shared with all ardent spirits the hope of Eu-, 
rope on the outbreak of the French Revolution, af- 
ter witnessing its sequel, recorded his conviction 


that ‘the amelioration of outward circumstances) | 


will be the effect but can never be the means of } 
mental and moral improvement.” Quitting now 

the class of actors, let us turn to see how it stands 

with the other class of which we spoke, namely, the 

students. 


A wad ease has fallen on the life of man.4, - % 


Every Age, like every human body, has its own 
distemper. Other times have had war, or famine, 
or a barbarism, domestic or bordering, as their an- 
tagonism. Our forefathers walked in the world/ 
and went to their graves tormented with the fear) 
of Sin and the terror of the Day of J udgment.| 


ev 
Py 


268 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


These terrors have lost their force, and our tor- 


ment is Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we 


ought to do; the distrust of the value of what we 
do, and the distrust that the Necessity (which we 
all at last believe in) is fair and’ beneficent. Our 
Religion assumes the negative form of rejection. 
Out of love of the true, we repudiate the false ; 
and the Religion is an abolishing criticism. A 
great perplexity hangs like a cloud on the brow of 
all cultivated persons, a certain imbecility in the 
best spirits, which distinguishes the period. We 
do not find the same trait in the Arabian, in the 
Hebrew, in Greek, Roman, Norman, English peri- 
ods; no, but in other men a natural firmness. 
The men did not see beyond the need of the 
hour. They planted their foot strong, and doubted 
nothing. We mistrust every step we take. We 
find it the worst thing about time that we know 
not what to do with it. We are so sharp-sighted 
that we can neither work nor think, neither read 
Plato nor not read him. 

Then there is what is called a too intellectual 
tendency. Can there be too much intellect? We 
have never met with any such excess. But the 
eriticism which is levelled at the laws and man- 


ners, ends in thought, without causing a new 
_method of life. The genius of the day does not 


incline to a deed, but to a beholding. It is not, 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 269 


that men do not wish to act; they pine to be em- 
ployed, but are paralyzed by the uncertainty what | 
they should do. The inadequacy of the work to 
the faculties is the painful perception which keeps 
them still. This happens to the best. Then, tal- 
ents bring their usual temptations, and the current 
literature and poetry with perverse ingenuity draw 
us away from life to solitude and meditation. This 
could well be borne, if it were great and involun- 
tary ; 1f the men were ravished by their thought, 
and hurried into ascetic extravagances. Society 
could then manage to release their shoulder from 
its wheel and grant them for a time this _privi- 
lege of sabbath. But they are not so. Thinking, 
which was. a rage, is become an art. The thinker) 
gives me results, and never invites me to be pres? 
ent with him at his invocation of truth, and to eng 
joy with him its proceeding into his mind. 

So little action amidst such audacious and yet 
sincere profession, that we begin to doubt if that 
great revolution in the art of war, which has made 
it a game of posts instead of a game of battles, has 
not operated on Reform; whether this be not also 
a war of posts, a paper blockade, in which each 
party is to display the utmost resources of his 
spirit and belief, and no conflict occur, but the 
world shall take that course which the demonstra- 
tion of the truth shall indicate. 


270 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


But we must pay for being too intellectual, as 
they call it. People are not as light-hearted for it. 
I think men never loved life less. I question if 
care and doubt ever wrote their names so legibly 
on the faces of any population. This Hnnwi, for 
which we Saxons had no name, this word of France 
has got a terrific significance. It shortens life, 
and bereaves the day of its ight. Old age begins 
in the nursery, and before the young American is 
put into jacket and trowsers, he says, ‘I want 
something which I never saw before;’ and ‘I 
wish I was not I.’ I have seen the same gloom on 
the brow even of those adventurers from the intel- 
lectual class who had dived deepest and with most 
success into active life. I have seen the authentic 
sign of anxiety and perplexity on the greatest 
forehead of the State. The canker worms have 
crawled to the topmost bough of the wild elm, and 
swing down from that. Is there less oxygen in 
the atmosphere? What has checked in this age 
the animal spirits which gave to our forefathers 
their bounding pulse ? 

But have a little patience with this melancholy 
bumor. Their unbelief arises out of a greater 
Belief; their inaction out of a scorn of inadequate 
action. By the side of these men, the hot agita- 
tors have a certain cheap and ridiculous air; they 
even look smaller than the others. Of the two, I 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. A} 


own | like the speculators best. They have some 
piety which looks with faith to a fair Future, un- 
profaned by rash and unequal attempts to realize 
it. And truly we shall find much to console us, 
when we consider the cause of their uneasiness. It 
is the love of greatness, it is the need of harmony, 
the contrast of the dwarfish Actual with the exor- 
bitant Idea. No man can compare the ideas and 
aspirations of the innovators of the present day 
with those of former periods, without feeling how 
great and high this criticism is. The revolutions 
that impend over society are not now from ambi- 
tion and rapacity, from impatience of one or an-_ 
other form of government, but from new modes of 
thinking, which shall recompose society after a 
new order, which shall animate labor by love and 
science, which shall destroy the value of many kinds 
of property and replace all property within the 
- dominion of reason and equity. There was never 

so great a thought laboring in the breasts of men ; 
as now. It almost seems as if what was aforetime 
spoken fabulously and hieroglyphically, was now 
spoken plainly, the doctrine, namely, of the indwell- 
ing of the Creator in man. The spiritualist wishes 
this only, that the spiritual principle should be suf- 
fered to demonstrate itself to the end, in all possi- 
ble applications to the state of man, without the 
admission of anything unspiritual, that is, anything 


272 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


positive, dogmatic, or personal. The excellence of 
this class consists in this, that they have believed ; 
that, affirming the need of new and higher modes 
of living and action, they have abstained from the 
recommendation of low methods. Their fault is 
that they have stopped at the intellectual percep- 
tion ; that their will is not yet inspired from the 
Fountain of Love. But whose fault is this? and 
what a fault, and to what inquiry does it lead! 
We have come to that which is the spring of all 
power, of beauty and virtue, of art and poetry ; 
and who shall tell us according to what law its in- 
spirations and its informations are given or with- 
holden ? | 

I do not wish to be guilty of the narrowness and 
pedantry of inferring the tendency and genius of 
the Age from a few and insufficient facts or per- 
sons. Every age has a thousand sides and signs 
and tendencies, and it is only when surveyed from 
inferior points of view that great varieties of char- 
acter appear. Our time too is full of activity and 
performance. Is there not something comprehen- 
sive in the grasp of a society which to great mechan- 
ical invention and the best institutions of property 
adds the most daring theories; which explores the 
subtlest and most universal problems? -At the 
manifest risk of repeating what every other Age 
has thought of itself, we might say we think the 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 273 


Genius of this Age more philosophical than any 
other has been, righter in its aims, truer, with less | 
fear, less fable, less mixture of any sort. : 

But turn it how we will, as we ponder this mean- 
ing of the times, every new thought drives us to 
the deep fact that the Time is the child of the Eter- 

_nity. The main interest which any aspects of the? 
Times can have for us, is the great spirit which ¢ 
gazes through them, the light which they can shed } 
on the wonderful questions, What we are? and 
Whither we tend? We do not waatingdes deceived’ 
WAL AAA LW ,| 
Here we drift, like white sail across the wild ocean, 
now bright on the wave, now darkling in the trough’, 
of the sea; —but from what port did we sail?) 
Who knows? Or to what port are we bound ? 
Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such 
poor weather-tossed mariners as ourselves, whom 
we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some sig- 
nal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle from far. 

- But what know they more than we? ‘They also 
found themselves on this wondrous sea. No; from 
the older sailors, nothing. Over all their speaking- 
trumpets, the gray sea and the loud winds answer, 
Not in us; notin Time. Where then but in Our- 
selves, where but in that Thought through which we 
communicate with absolute nature, and are made 
aware that whilst we shed the dust of which we are | 
built, grain by grain, till it is all gone, the law’ 


VOL. I. 18 


274 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


which clothes us with humanity remains anew? | 
where but in the intuitions which are vouchsafed 
us from within, shall we learn the Truth? Faith- 
less, faithless, we fancy that with the dust we de- 
part and are not, and do not know that the law and 
the perception of the law are at last one; that only 
as much as the law enters us, becomes us, we are 
living men, — immortal with the immortality of 
this law. Underneath all these appearances lies 
/that which is, that which lives, that which causes. 
» This ever renewing generation of appearances rests 
\ on a reality, and a reality that is alive. 
_ To a true scholar the attraction of the aspects of 
nature, the departments of life, and the passages of 
_his experience, is simply the information they yield 
( him of this supreme nature which lurks within all. 
/ That reality, that causing force is moral. The 
) Moral Sentiment is but its other name. It makes 
by its presence or absence right and wrong, beauty 
and ugliness, genius or depravation. As the gran- 
ite comes to the surface and towers into the highest 
mountains, and, if we dig down, we find it below the 
superficial strata, so in all the details of our domes- 
tic or civil life is hidden the elemental reality, which 
ever and anon comes to the surface, and forms the 
grand men, who are the leaders and examples, 
rather than the companions of the race. The gran- 
ite is curiously concealed under a thousand forma 


LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 275 


tions and surfaces, under fertile soils, and grasses, 
and flowers, under well-manured, arable fields, and 
large towns and cities, but it makes the foundation 
of these, and is always indicating its presence by 
slight but sure signs. So is it with the Life of our 
life ; so close does that also hide. I read it in glad 
and in weeping eyes; I read it in the pride and in 
the humility of people; it is recognized in every 
bargain and in every complaisance, in every criti- 
cism, and in all praise ; it is voted for at elections; | 
it wins the cause with juries; it rides the stormy 
eloquence of the senate, sole victor; histories are 
written of it, holidays decreed to it ; statues, tombs, 
churches, built to its honor; yet men seent to fear . 
and to shun it when it comes barely to view in our 
immediate neighborhood. 

For that reality let us stand; that let us serve, 
and for that speak. Only as far as that shines | 
through them are these times or any times worth 
consideration. I wish to speak of the politics, ed- 
ucation, business, and religion around us without 
ceremony or false deference. You will absolve me 
from the charge of flippancy, or malignity, or the 
desire to say smart things at the expense of whom- 
soever, when you see that reality is all we prize, 
and that we are bound on our entrance into nature 
to speak for that. Let it not be recorded in our 
own memories that in this moment of the Eternity, 


276 LECTURE ON THE TIMES. 


when we who were named by our names flitted 
across the light, we were afraid of any fact, or dis- 
graced the fair Day by a pusillanimous preference 
of our bread to our freedom. What is the scholar, 
what is the man for, but for hospitality to every 
new thought of his time? Have you leisure, power, 
property, friends? You shall be the asylum and 
patron of every new thought, every unproven opin- 
ion, every untried project which proceeds out of 
good will and honest seeking. All the newspapers, 
all the tongues of to-day will of course at first. de- 
fame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, 
not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand 
for it: ahd the highest compliment man ever re- 
ceives from heaven is the sending to him its dis- 
guised and discredited angels. 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 


A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, 
DECEMBER 9, 1841 


is 


¥ 
> oR 


" 
das 
‘ 
ea 
: 
\ 
e245 
* 
‘ 
dha 


VOTO BTR 


is 


red 


a 





* 
‘ 
4 


> 


i 


i 


¢ 


Ai - : 


ve 


if; TOU, 


REE ft nie ome 





Laine 


a pra (oH autre 


ne ate pelle 
anced ‘peat? ‘ae; 
Eg ays, 

iS 3 oe ican 
aris lia - 


ee 


x 


a Pad daira art wed ; 





4. 
: 
4 











THE CONSERVATIVE. 





THE two parties which divide the state, the party 
of Conservatism and that of Innovation, are very 
old, and have disputed the possession of the world 
ever since it was made. This quarrel is the sub- 
ject of civil history. The conservative party estab: 


ie 


lished the reverend hierarchies and monarchies of 

the most ancient world. The battle of patrician \ 
and plebeian, of parent state and colony, of old us- ( 
age and accommodation to new facts, of the rich { 
and the poor, reappears in all countries and times. ( 
The war rages not only in battle-fields, in national | 
councils and ecclesiastical synods, but agitates \ 
every man’s bosom with opposing advantages every | 
hour. On rolls the old world meantime, and now | 
one, now the other gets the day, and still the fight | 


“Re aroacmesion 


renews itsélf as if for the first time, under new 
- names and hot personalities. 

Such an irreconcilable antagonism of course 
must have a correspondent depth of seat in the hu- 
man constitution. It is the opposition of Past and; 


Future, of Memory and Hope, of the Understand. / 


280 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


ing and the Reason. It is the primal antagonism, 
the appearance in trifles of the two poles of na- 
ture. 

There is a fragment of old fable which seems 
somehow to have been dropped from the current 
mythologies, which may deserve attention, as it ap- 
pears to relate to this subject. 

Saturn grew weary of sitting alone, or with none 
but the great Uranus or Heaven beholding him, 
and he created an oyster. Then he would act 
again, but he made nothing more, but went on 
creating the race of oysters. Then Uranus cried, 
‘A new work, O Saturn! the old is not good 
again.’ 

Saturn replied,‘ I fear. There is not only the 
alternative of making and not making, but also of 
unmaking. Seest thou the great sea, how it ebbs 
and flows? so is it with me; my power ebbs; and if 
I put forth my hands, I shall not do, but undo. 
Therefore I do what I have done; I hold what I 
have got; and so I resist Night and Chaos.’ 

‘O Saturn,’ replied Uranus, ‘thou canst not hold 
thine own but by making more. Thy oysters are — 
barnacles and cockles, and with the next flowing of | 
the tide they will be pebbles and sea-foam.’ 

‘I see,’ rejoins Saturn, ‘thou art in league with 
Night, thou art become an evil eye; thou spakest 
from love; now thy words smite me with hatred. 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 981 


I appeal to Fate, must there not be rest?’ — ‘I 
appeal to *Fate also,’ said Uranus, ‘ must there not 
be motion?’— But Saturn was silent, and went 
on making oysters for a thousand years. 

After that, the word of Uranus eame into his 
mind like a ray of the sun, and he made Jupiter ; 
and then he feared again; and nature froze, the _ 
things that were made went backward, and to save / 
the world, Jupiter slew his father Saturn. , LA 

This may stand for the earliest account of a con-\ 
versation on politics between a Conservative and a 
Radical which has come down to us. It is ever 
thus. It is the counteraction of the centripetal “ 
and the centrifugal forces. Innovation is the sa- | 
lient energy ; Conservatism the pause on the last 
movement. ‘That which is was made by God,’ 
saith Conservatism. ‘He is leaving that, he is en- 
tering this other,’ rejoins Innovation. 

There is always a certain meanness in the argu- 
ment of conservatism, joined with a certain superi- 
ority in its fact. It affirms because it holds. Its 
fingers clutch the fact, and it will not open its eyes 
to see a better fact. The castle which conservatism 
is set to defend is the actual state of things, good 
and bad. The project of innovation is the best 
possible state of things. Of course conservatism 
always has the worst of the argument, is always 
apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to 


282 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


change would be to deteriorate: it must saddle it- 
self with the mountainous load of the vielence and 
vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, 
deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet ; 
whilst innovation is always im the right, triumpl:- 
ant, attacking, and sure of final success. Conser- 
vatism stands on man’s confessed lmitations, re- 
form on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism 
on circumstance, liberalism on power; one goes to 
make an adroit member of the social frame, the 
other to postpone all things to the man himself ; 
conservatism is debonair and social, reform is in- 
dividual and imperious. We are reformers in 
spring and summer, in autumn and winter we 
stand by the old; reformers in the morning, con- 
servers at night. Reform is affirmative, conserva- 
tism negative ; conservatism. goes for comfort, re- 
form for truth. Conservatism is more candid to 
behold another’s worth; reform more disposed to 
maintain and increase its own. Conservatism 
makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no inven- 
tion; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, 
no prudence, no husbandry. It makes a great dif- 
ference to your figure and to your thought whether 
your foot is advancing or receding. Conservatism 
never puts the foot forward; in the hour when it 
does that, it is not establishment, but reform. Con- 
servatism tends to universal seeming and treachery, 


—— 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 2838 


believes in a negative fate; believes that men’s 
temper governs them; that for me it avails not to 
trust in principles, they will fail me, I must bend 
a little; it distrusts nature; it thinks- there is a 
general law without a particular application, — 
law for all that does not include any one. Reform 
in its antagonism inclines to asinine resistance, to 
kick with hoofs; it runs to egotism and bloated 
self-conceit ; it runs to a bodiless pretension, to un- 
natural refining and elevation which ends in Meee 
risy and sensual reaction. 

And so, whilst we do not go beyond general state- 
ments, it may be safely affirmed of these two meta- 
physical antagonists, that each is a good | half, but 
an n impossible \ whole. Each exposes the abuses of 
the other, but in a jane society, in a true man, both 
must combine. Nature does not give the crown of 
its approbation, namely beauty, to any action or 
emblem or actor but to one which combines both 
these elements ; not to the rock which resists the 
waves from age to age, nor to the wave which lashes _ 
incessantly the rock, but the superior beauty is with 
the oak which stands with its hundred arms against 
the storms of a century, and grows every year like | 
a sapling; or the river which ever flowing, yet 1s! 
found in the same bed from age to age; or, greatest 
of all, the man who has subsisted for years amid 
the changes of nature, yet has distanced himself, so 


284 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


that when you remember what he was, and see 
what he is, you say, What strides! what a disparity 
is here ! 

Throughout nature the past combines in every 
creature with the present. Each of the convolu- 
tions of the sea-shell, each node and spine marks 
one year of the fish’s life; what was the mouth of 
the shell for one season, with the addition of new 
matter by the growth of the animal, becoming an 
ornamental node. The leaves and a shell of soft 
wood are all that the vegetation of this summer has 
made; but the solid columnar stem, which lifts that 


bank of foliage into the air, to draw the eye and to 
f 


(cool us with its shade, is the gift and legacy of dead 


Bt 


} 
i{ land buried years. 

In nature, each of these elements being always 
present, each theory has a natural support. As we 
take our stand on Necessity, or on Ethics, shall we 
go for the conservative, or for the reformer. If we 

read the world historically, we shall say, Of all the 
‘ages, the present hour and circumstance is the cu- 
mulative result; this is the best throw of the dice 
of nature that has yet been, or that is yet possible. 
PI£ we see it from the side of Will, or the Moral 
_ Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past and the Pres- 
ent, and require the impossible of the Future. 
But although this bifold fact lies thus united in 
real nature, and so united that no man can con- 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 285 


tinue to exist in whom both these elements do not 
work, yet men are not philosophers, but are rather 
very foolish children, who, by reason of their par- 
tiality, see everything in the most absurd. manner, 
and are the victims at all times of the nearest. ob- 
ject. There is even no philosopher who is a phi- 
losopher at all times. Our experience, our percep- 
tion is conditioned by the need to acquire in parts 
and in succession, that is, with every truth a cer- 
tain falsehood. As this is the invariable method of 
our training, we must give it allowance, and suffer 
men to learn as they have done for six muillenni- 
ums, a word at a time; to pair off into insane par. 
ties, and learn the amount of truth each knows: 
by the denial of an equal amount of truth. For 
the present, then, te come at what sum is attaina- 
ble to us, we must even hear the parties plead as 
parties. 

That which is best about conservatism, that 
which, though it cannot be expressed in detail, in- 
spires reverence in all, is the Inevitable. There is 
the question not only what the conservative says 
for himself, but, why must he say it? What insur- 
mountable fact binds him to that side? Here is 
the fact which men call Fate, and fate in dread de- 
grees, fate behind fate, not to be disposed of by the 
consideration that the Conscience commands this or 
that, but necessitating the question whether the fac- 


286 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


ulties of man will play him true in resisting the 
facts of universal experience ? For although the 
commands of the Conscience are essentially abso- 
lute, they are historically limitary. Wisdom does 
not seek a literal rectitude, but an useful, that is 
a conditioned one, such a one as the faculties of 
man and the constitution of things will warrant. 
The reformer, the partisan, loses himself in driving 
to the utmost some specialty of right conduct, until 
his own nature and all nature resist him; but Wis- 
dom attempts nothing enormous and dispropor- 
tioned to its powers, nothing which it cannot per- 
form or nearly perform. We have all a certain in- 
tellection or presentiment of reform existing in the 
mind, which does not yet descend into the charac- 
ter, and those who throw themselves blindly on this 
lose themselves. Whatever they attempt in that 
direction, fails, and reacts suicidally on the actor 
himself, This is the penalty of having transcended 
nature. For the existing world is not a dream, and 
cannot with impunity be treated as a dream; nei- 
ther is it a disease; but it is the ground on which 
you stand, it is the mother of whom you were born. 
Reform converses with possibilities, perchance with 
impossibilities ; but here is sacred fact. This also 
was true, or it could not be: it had life in it, or it 
could not have existed ; it has life in it, or it could 
‘not continue. Your schemes may be feasible, or 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 287 


may not be, but this has the endorsement of nature 
and a long friendship and cohabitation with the 
powers of nature. This will stand until a better 
cast of the dice is made. The contest between the 1/ 
Future and the Past is one between Divinity enter- V 
ing and Divinity departing. You are welcome to 
try your experiments, and, if you can, to displace 
the actual order by that ideal republic you an- 
nounce, for nothing but God will expel God. But 
plainly the burden of proof must lie with the pro-(| 
jector. We hold to this, until you can demonstrate) | 
something better. 

The system of property and law goes back for 
its origin to barbarous and sacred times ; it is the 
fruit of the same mysterious cause as the mineral 
or animal world. There is a natural sentiment 
and prepossession in favor of age, of ancestors, of 
barbarous and aboriginal usages, which is a hom- 
age to the element of necessity and divinity which 
is in them. The respect for the old names of | 
places, of mountains and streams, is universal. 
The Indian and barbarous name can never be sup- 
planted without loss. The ancients tell us that the 
gods loved the Ethiopians for their stable customs ; 
and the Egyptians and Chaldeans, whose origin / 
could not be explored, passed among the junior | 
tribes of Greece and Italy for sacred nations. 

Moreover, so deep is the foundation of the ex- 


288 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


isting social system, that it leaves no one out of it. 
We may be partial, but Fate is not. All men 
have their root in it. You who quarrel with the 
arrangements of society, and are willing to embroil 
all, and risk the indisputable good that exists, for 
the chance of better, live, move, and have your 
being in this, and your deeds contradict your 
words every day. For as you cannot jump from 
‘the ground without using the resistance of the 
ground, nor put out the boat to sea without shov- 
/ing from the shore, nor attain liberty without re- 
jecting obligation, so you are under the necessity 
of using the Actual order of things, in order to 
‘disuse it; to live by it, whilst you wish to take 
\away its life. The past has baked your loaf, and 
in the strength of-its bread you would break up the 
oven. But you are betrayed by your own nature. 
You also are conservatives. However men please to 
style themselves, I see no other than a conservative 
party. You are not only identical with us in your 
needs, but also in your methods and aims. You 
quarrel with my conservatism, but it is to build up 
one of your own; it will have a new beginning, 
but the same course and end, the same trials, the 
same passions ; among the lovers of the new I ob- 
serve that there is a jealousy of the newest, and 
that the seceder from the seceder is as damnable 
as the pope himself. 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 289 


On these and the like grounds of general state- 
ment, conservatism plants itself without danger of 
being displaced. Especially before this personal 
appeal, the innovator must confess his weakness, 
must confess that no man is to be found good 
enough to be entitled to stand champion for the 
principle. But when this great tendency comes to 
practical encounters, and is challenged by young 
men, to whom it is no abstraction, but a fact of 
hunger, distress, and exclusion from opportunities, 
it must needs seem injurious. The youth, of course, | 
is an innovator by the fact of his birth. There he } 
stands, newly born on the planet, a universal beg- \ 
gar, with all the reason of things, one would say, 
on his side. In his first consideration how to feed, 
clothe, and warm himself, he is met by warnings on 
every hand that this thing and that thing have 
owners, and he must go elsewhere. Then he says, 
‘If I am born in the earth, where is my part? have 
the goodness, gentlemen of this world, to show me 
my wood-lot, where I may fell my wood, my field 
where to plant my corn, my pleasant ground where 
to build my cabin.’ 

‘Touch any wood, or field, or house-lot, on your 
peril,’ cry all the gentlemen of this world ; ‘ but 
you may come and work in ours, for us, and we 
will give you a piece of bread.’ 

‘ And what is that peril?’ 


VOL. I. 19 


290 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


‘Knives and muskets, if we meet you in the act; 
imprisonment, if we find you afterward.’ 

‘ And by what authority, kind gentlemen ?’ 

‘ By our law.’ 

‘ And your law, —is it just?’ 

‘As just for you as it was for us. We wrought 
for others under this law, and got our lands so.’ 

‘I repeat the question, Is your law just? ’ 

‘Not quite just, but necessary. Moreover, it is 
juster now than it was when we were born; we 
have made it milder and more equal.’ 

‘I will none of your law,’ returns the youth; 
‘it encumbers me. I cannot understand, or so 
much as spare time to read that needless library 
of your laws. Nature has sufficiently provided me 
with rewards and sharp penalties, to bind me not 
to transgress. Like the Persian noble of old, I 
ask “that I may neither command nor obey.” I 
do not wish to enter into your complex social sys- 
tem. I shall serve those whom I can, and they 
who can will serve me. I shall seek those whom I 
love, and shun those whom I leve not, and what 
more can all your laws render me ?’ 

With equal earnestness and good faith, replies 
to this plaintiff an upholder of the establishment, 
a man of many virtues: 

‘Your opposition is feather-brained and _ over. 
fine. Young man, I have no skill to talk with 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 291 


you, but look at me; I have risen early and sat 
late, and toiled honestly and painfully for very 
many years. I never dreamed about methods; I 
laid my bones to, and drudged for the good I pos- 
sess ; it was not got by fraud, nor by luck, but by 
work, and you must show me a warrant like these 
stubborn facts in your own fidelity and labor, be- 
fore I suffer you, on the faith of a few fine words, 
to ride into my estate, and claim to scatter it as 
your own.’ 

‘Now you touch the heart of the matter,’ re- 
plies the reformer. ‘To that fidelity and labor I 
pay homage. Iam unworthy to arraign your man- 
ner of living, until I too have been tried. But I 
should be more unworthy if I did not tell you why 
I cannot walk in your steps. I find this vast net- 
work, which you call property, extended over the 
whole planet. I cannot occupy the bleakest crag 
of the White Hills or the Alleghany Range, but 
some man or corporation steps up to me to show 
me that it is his. Now, though I am very peace- 
able, and on my private account could well enough 
die, since it appears there was some mistake in my 
creation, and that I have been missent to this earth, 
where all the seats were already taken, — yet I feel 
called upon in behalf of rational nature, which I 
represent, to declare to you my opinion that if the 
Karth is yours so also is it mine. All your aggre- i/ 


992 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


gate existences are less to me a fact than is my 
own; as I am born to the Earth, so the Earth is 
given to me, what I want of it to till and to plant ; 
nor could I, without pusillanimity, omit to claim so 
much. I must not only have a name to live, J 
must live. My genius leads me to build a ditfer- 
ent manner of life from any of yours. I cannot 
then spare you the whole world. I love you bet- 
ter. I must tell you the truth practically; and 
take that which you call yours. It is God’s world 
and mine; yours as much as you want, mine as 
much as I want. Besides, I know your ways; I 
know the symptoms of the disease. To the end of 
your power you will serve this lie which cheats you. 
Your want is a gulf which the possession of the 
broad earth would not fill. Yonder sun in heaven 
you would pluck down from shining on the uni- 
verse, and make him a property and privacy, if 
you could ; and the moon and the north star you 
would quickly have occasion for in your closet and 
bed-chamber. What you do not want for use, you 
crave for ornament, and what your convenience 
\.could spare, your pride cannot.’ 

~On the other hand, precisely the defence which 
was set up for the British Constitution, namely 
that with all its admitted defects, rotten boroughs 
and monopolies, it worked well, and substantial 
justice was somehow done; the wisdom and the 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 293 


worth did get into parliament, and every interest 
did by right, or might, or sleight, get represented ; 
— the same defence is set up for the existing insti- 
tutions. They are not the best; they are not just; 
and in respect to you, personally, O brave young 
man! they cannot be justified. They have, it is 
most true, left you no acre for your own, and no 
law but our law, to the ordaining of which you were 
no party. But they do answer the end, they are 
really friendly to the good, unfriendly to the bad ; 
they second the industrious and the kind ; they 
foster genius. They really have so much flexibility 
as to afford your talent and character, on the whole, | 
the same chance of demonstration and _ success 
which they might have if there was no law and no 
property. 

It is trivial and merely superstitious to say that 
nothing is given you, no outfit, no exhibition; for 
in this institution of credit, which is as universal 
as honesty and promise in the human countenance, 
always some neighbor stands ready to be bread and 
land and tools and stock to the young adventurer. 
And if in any one respect they have come short, 
see what ample retribution of good they have made. 
They have lost no time and spared no expense 
to collect libraries, museums, galleries, colleges, 
palaces, hospitals, observatories, cities. The ages 
have not been idle, nor kings slack, nor the rich nig: 


294 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


gardly. Have we not atoned for this small offence_ 
/(which we could not help) of leaving you no right 
7 in the soil, by this splendid indemnity of ancestral 
& and national wealth? Would you have been born 
like a gipsy in a hedge, and preferred your free- 
dom on a heath, and the range of a planet which 
had no shed or boscage to cover you from sun and 
wind, — to this towered and citied world? to this 
world of Rome, and Memphis, and Constantinople, 
and Vienna, and Paris, and London, and New 
York? For thee Naples, Florence, and Venice ; 
- for thee the fair Mediterranean, the sunny Adri- 
atic; for thee both Indies smile; for thee the hos- 
pitable North opens its heated palaces under the 
polar circle; for thee roads have been cut in every 
direction across the land, and fleets of floating pal- 
aces with every security for strength and provision 
for luxury, swim by sail and by steam through all 
the waters of this world. Every island for thee 
has a town; every town a hotel. Though thou 
wast born landless, yet to thy industry and thrift 
and small condescension to the established usage, 
— scores of servants are swarming in every strange 
place with cap and knee to thy command ; scores, 
nay hundreds and thousands, for thy wardrobe, thy 
table, thy chamber, thy library, thy leisure; and 
every whim is anticipated and served by the best 
ability of the whole population of each country. 


THE CONSERVATIVE. | 295 


The king on the throne governs for thee, and the 
judge judges; the barrister pleads, the farmer tills, 
the joiner hammers, the postman rides. Is it not 
exaggerating a trifle to insist on a formal acknowl- 
edgment of your claims, when these substantial ad- 
vantages have been secured to you? Now can your 
children be educated, your labor turned to their ad- 
vantage, and its fruits secured to them after your 
death. It is frivolous to say you have no acre, be. 
cause you have not a mathematically measured Ba 
of land. Providence takes care that you shall have 
a place, that you are waited for, and come accred- 
ited ; and as soon as you put your gift to use, you 
shall have acre or acre’s worth according to your 
exhibition of desert, — acre, if you need land ;— 
acre’s worth, if you prefer to draw, or carve, or” 
make shoes or wheels, to the tilling of the soil. 
Besides, it might temper your indignation at the 
supposed wrong which society has done you, to 
keep the question before you, how society got into 
this predicament ? Who put things on this false 
basis? No single man, but all men. No man vol- 
untarily and knowingly ; but it is the result of that, 
degree of culture there is in the planet. The or-j 
der of things is as good as the character of the pop- {/ 
ulation permits. Consider it as the work of a 
ereat and beneficent and progressive necessity, 
which, from the first pulsation in the first animal / 


296 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


life, up to the present high culture of the best na- 
tions, has advanced thus far. Thank the rude fos- 
ter-mother though she has taught you a better wis- 
dom than her own, and has set hopes in your heart 
which shall be history in the next ages. You are 
yourself the result of this manner of living, this 
foul compromise, this vituperated Sodom. It nour- 
ished you with care and love on its breast, as it had 
nourished many a lover of the right and many a 
poet, and prophet, and teacher of men. Is it so ir- 
remediably bad? Then again, if the mitigations 
are considered, do not all the mischiefs virtually 
vanish? The form is bad, but see you not how 
every personal character reacts on the form, and 
makes it new? A strong person makes the law 
and custom null before his own will. Then the 
principle of love and truth reappears in the strict- 
est courts of fashion and property. Under the 
richest robes, in the darlings of the selectest circles 
of European or American aristocracy, the strong 
heart will beat with love of mankind, with impa- 
tience of accidental distinctions, with the desire to 
achieve its own fate and make every ornament it 
‘wears authentic and real. 

Moreover, as we have already shown that there 
is no pure reformer, so it is to be considered that 
there is no pure conservative, no man who from 
_ the beginning to the end of his life maintains the 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 297 


defective institutions ; but he who sets his face like 
a flint against every novelty, when approached in the 
confidence of conversation, in the presence of | 
friendly and generous persons, has also his gracious | 
and relenting moments, and espouses for the time 
the cause of man; and even if this be a shortlived 
emotion, yet the remembrance of it in private hours 
mitigates his selfishness and compliance with cus- 
tom. 

The Friar Bernard lamented in his cell on Ze 
Mount Cenis the crimes of mankind, and rising 
one morning before day from his bed of moss and 
dry leaves, he gnawed his roots and berries, drank 
of the spring, and set forth to go to Rome to re- 
form the corruption of mankind. On his way he 
encountered many travellers who ee him cour- 
teously, and the cabins of the peasants and the 
castles of the lords supplied his few wants. When 
he came at last to Rome, his piety and good will 
easily introduced him to many families of the rich, 
and on the first day he saw and talked with gentle 
mothers with their babes at their breasts, who told 
him how much love they bore their children, and 
how they were perplexed in their daily walk lest 
they should fail in their duty to them. ‘ What!’ 
he said, ‘and this on rich embroidered carpets, on 
marble floors, with cunning sculpture, and carved 


wood, and rich pictures, and piles of books about , 
/ 


998 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


you ?’ —‘ Look at our pictures and books,’ they 
said, ‘and we will tell you, good Father, how we 
spent the last evening. These are stories of godly 
children and holy families and romantic sacrifices 
made in old or in recent times by great and not 
mean persons; and last evening our family was 
collected and our husbands and brothers discoursed 
sadly on what we could save and give in the hard 
times. Then came in the men, and they said, 
‘What cheer, brother? Does thy convent want 
gifts?’ Then the friar Bernard went home swiftly 
with other thoughts than he brought, saying, ‘ This 
way of life is wrong, yet these Romans, whom I 
prayed God to destroy, are lovers, they are lovers ; 
\what can I do?’ 

~ The reformer concedes that these mitigations ex- 
ist, and that if he proposed comfort, he should 
take sides with the establishment. Your words are 
excellent, but they do not tell the whole. Conser- 
vatism is affluent and openhanded, but there is a 
cunning juggle in riches. I observe that they take 
somewhat for everything they give. I look bigger, 
but am less; I have more clothes, but am not so 
warm; more armor, but less courage ; more books, 
but less wit. What you say of your planted, 
builded and decorated world is true enough, and I 
gladly avail myself of its convenience ; yet I have 
remarked that what holds in particular, holds in 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 299 


general, that the plant Man does not require aa 
his most glorious flowering this pomp of prepara- | 
tion and convenience, but the thoughts of some \ 
beggarly Homer who strolled, God knows when, in| 
the infancy and barbarism of the old world ; the | 
gravity and sense of some slave Moses who leads | 
away his fellow slaves from their masters ; the con- . 
templation of some Scythian Anacharsis ; the erect, 
formidable valor of some Dorian townsmen in the 
town of Sparta ; the vigor of Clovis the Frank, and 
Alfred the Saxon, and Alaric the Goth, and Ma- 
homet, Ali and Omar the Arabians, Saladin the 
Curd, and Othman the Turk, sufficed to build what 
you call society on the spot and in the instant when © 
the sound mind in a sound body appeared. Rich 
and fine is your dress, O conservatism ! your horses 
are of the best blood ; your roads are well cut and 
well paved ; your pantry is full of meats and your 
cellar of wines, and a very good state and condi- 
tion are you for gentlemen and ladies to live under ; 
but every one of these goods steals away a drop of | 
my blood. I want the necessity of supplying my 
own wants. _ All this: costly culture of yours is not 
necessary. Greatness does not need it. Yonder | 
peasant, who sits ‘neglected there in a corner, car-\ 
vies a whole revolution of man and nature in his( 
head, which shall bea sacred history to some future 
ages. For man is the end of nature; nothing so 


300 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


easily organizes itself in every part of the universe 
as he ; no moss, no lichen is so easily born; and he 
takes along with him and puts out from himself 
the whole apparatus of society and condition eatem- 
pore, aS an army encamps in a desert, and where 
all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city 
in an hour, a government, a market, a place for 
feasting, for conversation, and for love. 

These considerations, urged by those whose char- 
acters and whose fortunes are yet to be formed, 
must needs command the sympathy of all reasona- 
ble persons. But beside that charity which should 
make all adult persons interested for the youth, 
and engage them to see that he has a free field and 
fair play on his entrance into life, we are bound to 
see that the society of which we compose a part, 
does not permit the formation or continuance of 
‘views and practices injurious to the honor and wel- 
fare of mankind. The objection to conservatism, 
when embodied in a party, is that in its love of acts 
it hates principles; it lives in the senses, not in 
truth ; it sacrifices to despair ; it goes for available- 
ness in its candidate, not for worth; and for expe- 
diency in its measures, and not for the right. Un- 
der pretence of allowing for friction, it makes so 
many additions and supplements to the machine of 
society that it will play smoothly and softly, but will 
no longer grind any: grist. 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 301 


The conservative party in the universe concedes 
that the radical would talk sufficiently to the pur- 
pose, if we were still in the garden of Eden; he 
legislates for man as he ought to be; his theory is 
right, but he makes no allowance for friction; and 
this omission makes his whole doctrine false. The 
idealist retorts that the conservative falls into a far 
more noxious error in the other extreme. The con-, 
servative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his/ 
social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for, 
the present distress, a universe in slippers and flan- 
nels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and 
herb-tea. Sickness gets organized as well as health, 
the vice as well as the virtue. Now that a vicious 
system of trade has existed so long, it has stereo- 
typed itself in the human generation, and misers 
are born. And now that sickness has got such a 
foothold, leprosy has grown cunning, has got into| 
the ballot-box ; the lepers outvote the clean ; so-| 
ciety has resolved itself into a Hospital Committee, 
and all its laws are quarantine. If any man resist 
and set up a foolish hope he has entertained as 
good against the general despair, Society frowns on 
him, shuts him out of her opportunities, her grana- 
ries, her refectories, her water and bread, and will 
serve him a sexton’s turn. Conservatism takes as 
low a view of every part of human action and _ pas- 
sion. Its religion is just as bad; a lozenge for the 


802 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


sick; a dolorous tune to beguile the distemper ; 
mitigations of pain by pillows and anodynes; al- 
ways mitigations, never remedies; pardons for sin, 
funeral honors, — never self-help, renovation, and 
virtue. Its social and political action has no better 
aim; to keep out wind and weather, to bring the 
week and year about, and make the world last our 
day ; not to sit on the world and steer it; not to 
sink the memory of the past in the glory of a new 
and more excellent creation ; a timid cobbler and 
patcher, it degrades whatever it touches. The cause 
of education is urged in this country with the ut- 
most earnestness, —on what ground? Why on this, 
that the people have the power, and if they are not 
instructed to sympathize with the intelligent, read- 
ing, trading, and governing class; inspired with a 
taste for the same competitions and prizes, they 
will upset the fair pageant of Judicature, and per- 
haps lay a hand on the sacred muniments of wealth 
itself, and new distribute the land. Religion is 
taught in the same spirit. The contractors who 
were building a road out of Baltimore, some years 
ago, found the Irish laborers quarrelsome and re- 
fractory to a degree that embarrassed the agents 
and seriously interrupted the progress of the work. 
The corporation were: advised to call off the police 


/ and build a Catholic chapel, which they did; the 


priest presently restored order, and the work went 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 303 


on prosperously. Such hints, be sure, are too valu- 
able to be lost. If you do not value the Sabbath,\ 
or other religious institutions, give yourself no con ( 
cern about maintaining them. They have already / 
acquired a market value as conservators of prop- 
erty; and if priest and church-member should fail, \ 
the chambers of commerce and the presidents of i 
the banks, the very innholders and landlords of the 
county, would muster with fury to their support. } 
Of course, religion in such hands loses its es- 
sence. Instead of that reliance which the soul sug- 
gests, on the eternity of truth and duty, men are 
misled into a reliance on institutions, which, the 
moment they cease to be the instantaneous crea-, 
tions of the devout sentiment, are worthless. Re- 
ligion among the low becomes low. As it loses its 
truth, it loses credit with the sagacious. They de- 
tect the falsehood of the preaching, but when they 
say so, all good citizens cry, Hush; do not weaken 
the State, do not take off the strait jacket from 
dangerous persons. Every honest fellow must keep 
up the hoax the best he can; must patronize provi- 
dence and piety, and wherever he sees anything 
that will keep men amused, schools or churches or 
poetry or picture-galleries or music, or what not, 
he must ery “ Hist-a-boy,” and urge the game on. 
What a compliment we pay to the good SPIRIT \, 
with our superserviceable zeal ! 


Se 
a 


304 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


But not to balance reasons for and against the 
establishment any longer, and if it still be asked 
in this necessity of partial organization, which 
party on the whole has the highest claims on our 
sympathy, —I bring it home to the private heart, 
where all such questions must have their final arbi-_ 


trement.. How will every strong and generous 


mind choose its ground,— with the defenders of 
the old? or with the seekers of the new? Which 
is that state which promises to edify a great, brave, 
and beneficent man ; to throw him on his resources, 
and tax the strength of his character? On which 
part will each of us find himself in the hour of 
health and of aspiration ? 

I understand well the respect of mankind for 
war, because that breaks up the Chinese stagnation 
of society, and demonstrates the personal merits of 
all men. A state of war or anarchy, in which law 
has little force, is so far valuable that it puts every 
man on trial. The man of principle is known as 
such, and even in the fury of faction is respected. 
In the civil wars of France, Montaigne alone, 


‘among all the French gentry, kept his castle gates 


unbarred, and made his personal integrity as good 
at least as a regiment. The man of courage and 
resources is shown, and the effeminate and base 
person. Those who rise above war, and those who 
fall below it, it easily discriminates, as well as those 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 305 


who, accepting its rude conditions, keep their own 
head by their own sword. — 

But in peace and a commercial state we depend, 
not as we ought, on our knowledge and all men’s 
knowledge that we are honest men, but we cow- 
ardly lean on the virtue of others. For it is al- 
ways at last the virtue of some men in the society, 
which keeps the law in any reverence and power. 
Is there not something shameful that I should owe 
my peaceful occupancy of my house and field, not 
to the knowledge of my countrymen that I am use- 
ful, but to their respect for sundry other repu- 


table persons, I know not whom, whose joint virtue 


still keeps the law in good odor? 

It will never make any difference to a hero what 
the laws are. His greatness will shine and accom- 
plish itself unto the end, whether they second him 
or not. If he have earned his bread by drudgery, 
and in the narrow and crooked ways which were 
all an evil law had left him, he will make it at 
least honorable by his expenditure. Of the past 
he will take no heed; for its wrongs he will not 
hold himself responsible: he will say, All the mean- 
ness of my progenitors shall not bereave me of the 
power to make this hour and company fair and for- 
tunate. Whatsoever streams of power and com- 
modity flow to me, shall of me acquire healing vir- 


tue, and become fountains of safety. Cannot I too 
VOL. 1. 20 - 


} 
: 
\ 
} 


306 THE CONSERVATIVE. 


descend a Redeemer into nature? Whosover here- 
fafter shall name my name, shall not record a male- 
factor but a benefactor in the earth. If there be 
| power in good intention, in fidelity, and in toil, the 
| north wind shall be purer, the stars in heaven shall 
) glow with a kindlier beam, that I have lived. I 
am primarily engaged to myself to be a public ser- 
vant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that 
there is intelligence and good will at the heart of 
things, and ever higher and yet higher leadings. 
These are my engagements ; how can your law 
further or hinder me in what I shall do to men? 
On the other hand, these dispositions establish 
their relations to me. Wherever there is worth, 1 
shall be greeted. Wherever there are men, are 
the objects of my study and love. Sooner or later 
all men will be my friends, and will testify in all 
methods the energy of their regard. I cannot 
thank your law for my protection. I protect it. 
It is not in its power to protect me. It is my busi- 
ness to make myself revered. I depend on my 
honor, my labor, and my dispositions for my place 
in the affections of mankind, and not on any con- 
ventions or parchments of yours. 

But if I allow myself in derelictions and become 
idle and dissolute, I quickly come to love the pro- 
tection of a strong law, because I feel no title in 
myself to my advantages. To the intemperate and 


THE CONSERVATIVE. 307 


covetous person no love flows; to him mankind 
would pay no rent, no dividend, if force were once 
relaxed ; nay, if they could give their verdict, they 
would say that his self-indulgence and his oppres- 
sion deserved punishment from society, and not 
that rich board and lodging he now enjoys. The 
law acts then as a screen of his unworthiness, and 
makes him worse the longer it protects him. 

In conelusion, to return from this alternation of 
partial views to the high platform of universal and 
necessary history, it is a happiness for mankind | 
that innovation has got on so far and has so free a) 
field before it. The boldness of the hope men en- 
tertain transcends all former experience. It calms) * 
and cheers them with the picture of a simple and/ 
equal life of truth and piety. And this hope flow- 
ered on what tree? It was not imported from the 
stock of some celestial plant, but grew here on the 
wild crab of conservatism. It is much that this 
old and vituperated system of things has borne so 
fair a child. It predicts that amidst a planet peo- 
pled with conservatives, one Reformer may yet be © 


born. 


ee 
z 
; 
‘ 
5 A 
ry 
ey 
¥, 
; ? 
/ o3 
LV * 
s* 
, 
’ 
f 


eink 
“@ 
Li 
| 


hha 


a | 


Pe et 


3) 


10 (ag 


» 
a 


Bis ' Ips 


Ve 





y . i 
Ps 


AJ 
he ‘ 
PY b2e! 


‘ 


, 
, 


Don vs 
Re |, 
A is hd 





a> 


~ 
528 


? revit 1 





THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


A LECTURE READ AT THE MASONIC TEMPLE, BOSTON, JANUARY, . 
1842, 


Aa DOA AST 
er ane 


js BORA _ * a : ‘A 
iba ate 
{ 
Hues ve 


a a 





$ 
4 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 





THE first thing we have to say respecting what 
are called new views here in New England, at the 
present time, is, that they are not new, but the very \ / 
oldest of thoughts cast into the mould of these new 
times. The light is always identical in its compo- 
sition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and 
by so falling is first revealed to us, not in its own, 
form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like man-, 
ner, thought only appears in the objects it classi-) 
fies. What is popularly called Transcendentalism 
among us, is Idealism ; Idealism as it appears in 
1842. <As thinkers, mankind have ever divided 


into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first“. 
oe ag 


class founding on experience, the second on con- 
sciousness ; the first class beginning to think from 
the data of the senses, the second class perceive 
that the senses are not final, and say, The senses 
give us representations of things, but what are the 
things themselves, they cannot tell. The materi- 
alist insists on facts, on history, on the force of 
circumstances and the animal wants of man; the 


B12 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


idealist on the power of Thought and of Will, on in- 
spiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These 
two modes of thinking are both natural, but the 
idealist contends that his way of thinking is in 
higher nature. He concedes all that the other af- 
firms, admits the impressions of sense, admits their 
coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the 
materialist for his grounds of assurance that things 
are as his senses represent them. But I, he says, 
affirm facts not affected by the illusions of sense, 
facts which are of the same nature as the faculty 
which reports them, and not liable to doubt ; facts 
which in their first appearance to us assume a na- 
tive superiority to material facts, degrading these 
into a language by which the first are to be spoken ; 
facts which it only needs a retirement from the 
senses to discern. Every materialist will be an 
idealist ; but an idealist can never go backward to 
be a materialist. 

The idealist, in speaking of events, sees them as 
spirits. He does not deny the sensuous fact: by 
no means; but he will not see that alone. He does 
not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and 
the walls of this room, but he looks at these things 
as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, 
each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual 
fact which nearly concerns him. This manner of 
looking at things transfers every object in nature 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 313 


from an independent and anomalous position with- 
out there, into the consciousness. Even the materi- 
alist Condillac, perhaps the most logical expounder 
of materialism, was constrained to say, “ Though 
we should soar into the heavens, though we should 
sink into the abyss, we never go out of ourselves ; 
it is always our own thought that we perceive.” 
What more could an idealist say ? 

The materialist, secure in the certainty of sensa- 
tion, mocks at fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and 
dreamers, and believes that his life is solid, that he 
at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where 
he stands, and what he does. Yet how easy it is 
to show him that he also is a phantom walking and © 
working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask 
a question or two beyond his daily questions to 
find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable 
before his sense. The sturdy capitalist, no matter 
how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite 
he lays the foundations of his banking-house or 
Exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube cor- 
responding to the angles of his structure, but on a\ 
mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or; 
white-hot perhaps at the core, which rounds off to 
an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft 
air, and , and goes spinning away, dragging bank and ( 
banker with it at a rate of thousands of miles the | 
hour, he knows not whither, — a bit of bullet, now 


314 THRE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic 
| space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of empti- 
_ ness. And this wild balloon, in which his whole 
/ venture is embarked, is a just symbol of his whole 
, state and faculty. -One thing at least, he says, 1s 
certain, and does not give me the headache, that 
figures do not lie; the multiplication table has been 
hitherto found unimpeachable truth; and, more- 
over, if I put a gold eagle in my safe, I find it 
again to-morrow ; — but for these thoughts, I know 
not whence they are. They change and pass away. 
But ask him why he believes that an uniform ex- 
perience will continue uniform, or on what grounds 
he founds his faith in his figures, and he will per- 
/ceive that his mental fabric is built up on just as 
/ strange and quaking foundations as his proud edi- 
\ fice of stone. 
~ In the order of thought, the materialist takes 
his departure from the external world, and esteems 
amanas one product of that. The idealist takes 
his departure from his consciousness, and reckons 
the world an appearance. The materialist respects 
sensible masses, Society, Government, social art and 
luxury, every establishment, every mass, whether 
majority of numbers, or extent of space, or amount 
of objects, every social action. The idealist has 
another measure, which is metaphysical, namely the 
rank which things themselves take in his conscious. 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 315 


ness; not at all the size or appearance. Mind is 
the only reality, of which men and all other natures 
are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, 
history, are only subjective phenomena. Although 
in his action overpowered by the laws of action, 
and so, warmly codperating with men, even prefer- 
ring them to himself, yet when he speaks scientif- 
ically, or after the order of thought, he is con- 
strained to degrade persons into representatives of 
truths. He does not respect labor, or the products 
of labor, namely property, otherwise than as a 
manifold symbol, illustrating with wonderful fidel- 
ity of details the laws of being ; he does not respect 
government, except as far as it reiterates the law 
of his mind ; nor the church, nor charities, nor arts, 
for themselves ; but hears, as at a vast distance, 
what they say, as if his consciousness would speak 
to him through a pantomimic scene. His thought, 
that is the Universe. His experience inclines 
him to behold the procession of facts you call the 
world, as flowing perpetually outward from an in- 
visible, unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of 
him and of them, and necessitating him to regard 
all things as having a subjective or relative exis- 
tence, relative to that aforesaid Unknown Centre 
of him. 

From this transfer of the world into the con- 
sciousness, this beholding of all things in the mind, 


316 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


follow easily his whole ethics. It is simpler to be 
self-dependent. The height, the deity of man is to 
be self-sustained, to need no gift, no foreign force. 
Society is good when it does not violate me, but 
best when it is likest to solitude. Everything real 
is self-existent. Everything divine shares the self- 
existence of Deity. All that you call the world is 
the shadow of that substance which you are, the 
perpetual creation of the powers of thought, of 
those that are dependent and of those that are in- 
dependent of your will. Do not cumber yourself 
with fruitless pains to mend and remedy remote ef- 
fects ; let the soul be erect, and all things will go 
well. You think me the child of my circumstances: 
I make my circumstance. Let any thought or mo- 
tive of mine be different from that they are, the 
difference will transform my condition and econ- 
omy. I—this thought which is called I —is the 
mould into which the world is poured like melted 
wax. The mould is invisible, but the world be- 
trays the shape of the mould. You call it the 
power of circumstance, but it is the power of me. 
Am I in harmony with myself? my position will 
seem to you just and commanding. Am I vicious 
and insane? my fortunes will seem to you obscure 
and descending. As I am, so shall I associate, and 
so shall I act; Ceesar’s history will paint out Ce. 
sar. Jesus acted so, because he thought so. I de 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 317 


not wish to overlook or to gainsay any reality; I 
say I make my circumstance ; but if you ask me, 
Whence am 1? I feel like other men my relation 
to that Fact which cannot be spoken, or defined, 
nor even thought, but which exists, and will exist. 
The Transcendentalist adopts the whole connec- 
tion of spiritual doctrine. He believes in miracle} 
in the perpetual openness of the human mind to | 


new influx of light and power; he believes in inspi-| 
ration, and in ecstasy. He wishes that the spiritual 

principle should be suffered to demonstrate itself 

to the end, in all possible applications to the state 

of man, without the admission of anything unspirit- 

ual; that is, anything positive, dogmatic, personal. | 
Thus the spiritual measure of inspiration is the) , 
depth of the thought, and never, who said it?! 
And so he resists all attempts to palm other rules 

and measures on the spirit than its own. 

In action he easily incurs the charge of antino- 
mianism by his avowal that he, who has the Law- 
giver, may with safety not only neglect, but even 
contravene every written commandment. In the 
play of Othello, the expiring Desdemona absolves 
her husband of the murder, to her attendant Emilia. 
Afterwards, when Emilia charges him with the 
erime, Othello exclaims, 

“You heard her say herself it was not I.” 


Emilia replies, 


318 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


“The more angel she, and thou the blacker devil.” 

Of this fine incident, Jacobi, the Transcendental 
moralist, makes use, with other parallel instances, 
in his reply to Fichte. Jacobi, refusing all meas- 
ure of right and wrong except the determinations 
of the private spirit, remarks that there 1s no crime 
but has sometimes been a virtue. “I,” he says, 
“am that atheist, that godless person who, in op- 
position to an imaginary doctrine of calculation, 
would lie as the dying Desdemona lied ; would lie 
and deceive, as Pylades when he personated Ores- 
tes ; would assassinate like Timoleon; would per- 
jure myself like Epaminondas and John de Witt; 
I would resolve on suicide like Cato; I would com- 
mit sacrilege with David; yea, and pluck ears of 
corn on the Sabbath, for no other reason than that 
I was fainting for lack of food. For I have assur- 
ance in myself that in pardoning these faults ac- 
cording to the letter, man exerts the sovereign right 
which the majesty of his being confers on him; he 
sets the seal of his divine nature to the grace he ac- 
cords.” } 

In like manner, if there is anything grand and 
daring in human thought or virtue, any reliance on 
the vast, the unknown ; any presentiment, any ex- 
travagance of faith, the spiritualist adopts it as 
most in nature. The oriental mind has always 


1 Coleridge’s Translation. 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 319 


tended to this largeness. Buddhism is an expres- 
sion of it. The Buddhist, who thanks no man, who 
says ‘Do not flatter your benefactors,” but who, in 
his conviction that every good deed can by no pos- 
sibility escape its reward, will not deceive the ben- 
efactor by pretending that he has done more than 
he should, is a Transcendentalist. 

You will see by this sketch that there is no such 
thing as a Transcendental party ; that there is no 
pure Transcendentalist ; that we know of none but 
prophets and heralds of such a philosophy ; that 
all who by strong bias of nature have leaned to the 
spiritual side in doctrine, have stopped short of 
their goal. We have had many harbingers and 
forerunners ; but of a purely spiritual life, history 
has' afforded no example. I mean we have yet no 
man who has leaned entirely on his character, and 
eaten angels’ food ; who, trusting to his sentiments, 
found life made of miracles ; who, working for uni- 
versal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; 
clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, 
and yet it was done by his own hands. Only in 
the instinct of the lower animals we find the sug- 
gestion of the methods of it, and something higher 
than our understanding. The squirrel hoards nuts 
and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what 
they do, and they are thus provided for without self | 
ishness or disgrace. 


820 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


Shall we say then that Transcendentalism is the 

Saturnalia or excess of Faith; the presentiment of 
a faith proper to man in his integrity, excessive 
only when his imperfect obedience hinders the sat- 
isfaction of his wish ? Nature is transcendental, 
exists primarily, necessarily, ever works and ad- 
vances, yet takes no thought for the morrow. Man 
owns the dignity of the life which throbs around 
him, in chemistry, and tree, and animal, and in the 
involuntary functions of his own body; yet he is 
balked when he tries to fling himself into this en- 
chanted circle, where all is done without degrada- 
tion. Yet genius and virtue predict in man the 
same absence of private ends and of condescension 
to circumstances, united with every trait and talent 
of beauty and power. 
y» This way of thinking, falling on Roman times, 
\made Stoic philosophers ; falling on despotic times, 
made patriot Catos and Brutuses; falling on su- 
‘perstitious times, made prophets and apostles; on 
popish times, made protestants and ascetic monks, 
preachers of Faith against the preachers of Works; 
on prelatical times, made Puritans and Quakers ; 
and falling on Unitarian and commercial times, 
makes the peculiar shades of Idealism which we 
_ know. 

It is well known to most of my audience that the 
Idealism of the present day acquired the name of 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. "ri “Sot 


‘Transcendental from the use of that_ term. _by_Im- 





skeptical p NTRS of Locke, which insisted that 
there was nothing in the intellect which was not 
previously in the experience of the senses, by show- 
ing that there was a very important class of ideas 
or imperative forms, which did not come by expe- 
rience, but through which experience was acquired ; 
that these were intuitions of the mind itself; and 
he denominated them Transcendental forms. The 
extraordinary profoundness and precision of that 
man’s thinking have given vogue to his nomencla- 
ture, in Europe and America, to that extent that 
whatever belongs to the class of intuitive thought 


tal. 

Although, as we have said, there is no pure 
Transcendentalist, yet the tendency to respect the 
intuitions and to give them, at least in our creed, 
all authority over our experience, has deeply col- 
ored the conversation and poetry of the present 
day; and the history of genius and of religion in 
these times, though impure, and as yet not incar- 
nated in any powerful individual, will be the his- 
tory of this tendency. 


It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the | 


coarsest observer, that many intelligent and relig- 
ious persons withdraw themselves from the common 


VOL. I. QI 


is popularly called at the present day Zranscenden- 


822 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


Aabors and competitions of the market and the 
caucus, and betake themselves to a certain soli- 
tary and critical way of living, from which no solid 
fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation. 
They hold themselves aloof: they feel the dispro- 
portion between their faculties and the work of- 
fered them, and they prefer to ramble in the coun- 
try and perish of ennui, to the degradation of such 
charities and such ambitions as the city can pro- 
pose to them. They are striking work, and crying 
out for somewhat worthy to do! What they do 
is done only because they are overpowered by the 
humanities that speak on all sides; and they con- 
sent to such labor as is open to them, though to 
their lofty dream the writing of Lliads or Hamlets, 
or the building of cities or empires seems drudg- 
‘ery. 

' Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp 
or angel, and these must. The question which a 
wise man and a student of modern history will ask, 
is, what that kind is? And truly, as’ in ecclesias- 
tical history we take so much pains to know what 
the Gnostics, what the Essenes, what the Mani- 
chees, and what the Reformers believed, it would 
not misbecome us to inquire nearer home, what 
these companions and contemporaries of ours think 
and do, at least so far as these thoughts and actions 
appear to be not accidental and personal, but com- 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. BLO 


mon to many, and the inevitable flower of the Tree 
of Time. Our American literature and spiritual, 
history are, we confess, in the optative mood ; but 
whoso knows these seething brains, these admirable 
radicals, these unsocial worshippers, these talkers 
who talk the sun and moon away, will believe that 
this heresy cannot pass away without leaving its 
mark. 

They are lonely ; the spirit of their writing and 
conversation is lonely ; they repel influences; they 
shun general society ; they incline to shut them- 
selves in their chamber in the house, to live in the 
country rather than in the town, and to find their 
tasks and amusements in solitude. Society, to be 
sure, does not like this very well; it saith, Whoso 
goes to walk alone, accuses the whole world; he 
declares all to be unfit to be his companions ; it is 
very uncivil, nay, insulting; Society will retaliate. 
Meantime, this retirement does not proceed from 
any whim on the part of these separators ; but if 
any one will take pains to talk with them, he will 
find that this part is chosen both from temperament 
and from principle ; with some unwillingness too, 
and as a choice of the less of two evils; for these 
persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and 
unsocial, — they are not stockish or brute, — but 
joyous, susceptible, affectionate ; they have even 
wore than others a great wish to be loved. Like 


824 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


the young Mozart, they are rather ready to cry ten 
times a day, “ But are you sure you love me?” 
Nay, if they tell you their whole thought, they will 
own that love seems to them the last and highest 
gift of nature; that there are persons whom in 
their hearts they daily thank for existing, — per- 
sons whose faces are perhaps unknown to them, but 
whose fame and spirit have penetrated their soli- 
tude, — and for whose sake they wish to exist. To 
behold the beauty of another character, which in- 
spires a new interest in our own; to behold the 
beauty lodged in a human being, with such vivacity 
of apprehension that I am instantly forced home 
to inquire if I am not deformity itself ; to behold 
in another the expression of a love so high that it 
assures itself, — assures itself also to me against 
every possible casualty except my unworthiness ; 
— these are degrees on the scale of human happi- 
ness to which they have ascended ; and it is a fidel- 
ity to this sentiment which has made common as- 
sociation distasteful to them. They wish a just 
and even fellowship, or none. They cannot gossip 
with you, and they do not wish, as they are sincere 
and religious, to gratify any mere curiosity which 
you may entertain. Like fairies, they do not wish 
to be spoken of. Love me, they say, but do not 
ask who is my cousin and my uncle. If you do 
not need to hear my thought, because you can read 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. B25 


it in my face and behavior, then I will tell it you 
from sunrise to sunset. If you cannot divine it, 
vou would not understand what I say. I will not 
molest myself for you. I do not wish to be pro- 
faned. 

And yet, it seems as if this loneliness, and not 
this love, would prevail in their circumstances, be- 
cause of the extravagant demand they make on 
human nature. That, indeed, constitutes a new 
feature in their portrait, that they are the most ex- 
acting and extortionate critics. Their quarrel with 
every man they meet is not with his kind, but with 
his degree. There is not enough of him, — that is 
the only fault. They prolong their privilege of 
childhood in this wise; of doing nothing, but mak- 
ing immense demands on all the gladiators in the 
lists of action and fame. They make us feel the 
strange disappointment which overcasts every hu- 
man youth. So many promising youths, and never 
a finished man! The profound nature will ave a 
savage rudeness; the delicate one will be shallow, 
or the victim of sensibility; the richly accomplished 
will have some capital absurdity ; and so every 
piece has a crack. ‘Tis strange, but this master- 
piece is the result of such an extreme delicacy that 
the most unobserved flaw in the boy will neutralize 
the most aspiring genius, and spoil the work. Talk — 
with a seaman of the hazards to life in his profession ; 


326 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


/ and he will ask you, ‘ Where are the old sailors? 


Do you not see that all are young men?’ And we, 
on this sea of human thought, in like manner in- 


/ quire, Where are the old idealists? where are they 


who represented to the last generation that extray- 
agant hope which a few happy aspirants suggest to 
ours? In looking at the class of counsel, and 
power, and wealth, and at the matronage of the 
land, amidst all the prudence and all the triviality, 
one asks, Where are they who represented genius, 
virtue, the invisible and heavenly world, to these ? 
Are they dead,— taken in early ripeness to the 
gods, —as ancient wisdom foretold their fate? Or 


did the high idea die out of them, and leave their 


unperfumed body as its tomb and tablet, announc- 
ing to all that the celestial mhabitant, who once 
gave them beauty, had departed? Will it be bet- 
ter with the new generation? We easily predict a 
fair future to each new candidate who enters the 
lists, but we are frivolous and volatile, and by low 
aims and ill example do what we can to defeat this 
hope. Then these youths bring us a rough but ef- 
fectual aid. By their wnconcealed dissatisfaction 
they expose our poverty and the insignificance of 
man to man. A man is a poor limitary benefactor. 
He ought to be a shower of benefits—a great influ- 
ence, which should never let his brother go, but 
should refresh old merits continually with new ones; 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 327 


so that though absent he should never be out of my 
mind, his name never far from my lips; but if the 
earth should open at my side, or my last hour 
were come, his name should be the prayer I should 
utter to the Universe. But in our experience, man 
is cheap and friendship wants its deep sense. We 
affect to dwell with our friends in their absence, 
but we do not; when deed, word, or letter comes 
not, they let us go. These exacting children adver- 
tise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no 
smooth speech with them; they pay you only this 
one compliment, of insatiable expectation ; they as- 
pire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast 
in this watch-tower, and persist in demanding unto 
the end, and without end, then are they terrible 
friends, whereof poet and priest cannot choose but 
stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds, and 
drink wind, they have not been without service to 
the race of man. 

With this passion for what is great and extraor- 
dinary, it cannot be wondered at that they are re- 
pelled by vulgarity and frivolity in people. They 
say to themselves, It is better to be alone than in 
bad company. And it is really a wish to be met, 
— the wish to find society for their hope and re- 
ligion, — which prompts them to shun what is called 
society. They feel that they are never so fit for 
friendship as when they have quitted mankind and 


328 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


taken themselves to friend. A picture, a book, a 
favorite spot in the hills or the woods which they 
can people with the fair and worthy creation of the 
fancy, can give them often forms so vivid that these 
for the time shall seem real, and society the illu- 
sion. : 

But their solitary and fastidious manners not 
only withdraw them from the conversation, but 
from the labors of the world; they are not good 
citizens, not good members of society ; unwillingly 
they bear their part of the public and private bur- 
dens; they do not willingly share in the public 
charities, in the public religious rites, in the enter- 
prises of education, of missions foreign and domes- 
tic, in the abolition of the slave-trade, or in the 
temperance society. They do not even like to vote. 
The philanthropists inquire whether Transcenden- 
talism does not mean sloth: they had as lef hear 
that their friend is dead, as that he is a Transcen- 
dentalist ; for then is he paralyzed, and can never 
do anything for humanity. What right, cries the 
good world, has the man of genius to retreat from 
work, and indulge himself? The popular literary 
creed seems to be, ‘1 am a sublime genius; I 
ought not therefore to labor.’ But genius is the 
‘power to labor better and more availably. Deserve 
{ thy genius: exalt it. The good, the illuminated, 
| sit apart from the rest, censuring their dulness and 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 329 


vices, as if they thought that by sitting very grand 
in their chairs, the very brokers, attorneys, and 
congressmen would see the error of their ways, and 
flock to them. But the good and wise must learn 
to act, and carry salvation to the combatants and 
demagogues in the dusty arena below. 

On the part of these children it is replied that life 
and their faculty seem to them gifts too rich to be 
squandered on such trifles as you propose to them. 
What you call your fundamental institutions, your 
great and holy causes, seem to them great abuses, 
and, when nearly seen, paltry matters. Hach ‘cause’ 
as it is called, —say Abolition, Temperance, say | 
Calvinism, or Unitarianism, — becomes speedily a 
little shop, where the article, let it, have been at first 
never so subtle and ethereal, is now made up into 
portable and convenient cakes, and retailed in small) 
quantities to suit purchasers. You make very free 
use of these words ‘great’ ana ‘holy,’ but few 
things appear to them such. Few persons have any 
magnificence of nature to inspire enthusiasm, and 
the philanthropies and charities have a certain air 
of quackery. As to the general course of living, 
and the daily employments of men, they cannot see 
much virtue in these, since they are parts of this 
vicious circle; and as no great ends are answered 
by the men, there is nothing noble in the arts by 
which they are maintained. Nay, they have made 


830 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


the experiment and found that from the liberal pro: 
fessions to the coarsest manual labor, and from the 
courtesies of the academy and the college to the 
conventions of the cotillon-room and the morning 
call, there is a spirit of cowardly compromise and 
seeming which intimates a frightful skepticism, a 
life without love, and an activity without an aim. 

Unless the action is necessary, unless it is ade- 
quate, I do not wish to perform it. I do not wish to 
do one thing but once. I do not love routine. Once 
) possessed of the principle, it is equally easy to make 
four or forty thousand applications of it. A great 
man will be content to have indicated in any the 
slightest manner his perception of the reig gning Idea _ 
of his time, and will leave to those 4 =e like it the 
_ multiplication of examples. When he has hit the 
white, the rest-may-shatter the target. Every thing 
admonishes us how needlessly long life is. Every 
moment of a hero so raises and cheers us that a 
twelvemonth is an age. All that the brave Xan- 
thus brings home from his wars is the recollection 
that at the storming of Samos, “in the heat of the 
battle, Pericles smiled on me, and passed on to an- 
other detachment.” It is the quality of the mo-_ 
ment, not the number “of days, of events, or of ac- 
tors, that imports. 

New, w we confess, and by no means happy, is our 
condition: if you want the aid of our labor, we 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 331 


ourselves stand in greater want of the labor. We 
are miserable with inaction. We perish of rest and 
rust: but we do not like your work. 

‘Then,’ says the world, ‘show me your own.’ 

‘ We have none.’ 

‘ What will you do, then?’ cries the world. 

‘We will wait.’ 

* How long ?’ 

‘Until the Universe beckons and calls us to 
work.’ 

‘ But whilst you wait, you grow old and useless.’ 

‘ Be it so: I can sit in a corner and perish (as 
you eall it), but I will not move until I have the 
highest command. If no call should come for 
years, fer centuries, then I know that the want of 
the Universe is the attestation of faith by my absti- 
nence. Your virtuous projects, so called, do not 
cheer me. I know that which shail come will cheer 
me. Jf I cannot work at least I need not lie. 
All that is clearly due to-day is not to lie. In 
other places other men have encountered sharp 
trials, and have behaved themselves well. The 
martyrs were sawn asunder, or hung alive on meat- 
hooks. Cannot we screw our courage to patience 
and truth, and without complaint, or even with 
good-humor, await our turn of action in the Infinite 
Counsels ? ’ 

But to come a little closer to the secret of these 


382 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


persons, we must say that to them it seems a very 
easy matter to answer the objections of the man of 
the world, but not so easy to dispose of the doubts 
and objections that occur to themselves. They are 
exercised in their own spirit with queries which ac- 
quaint them with all adversity, and with the trials 
of the bravest heroes. When I asked them concern- 
ing their private experience, they answered some- 
what in this wise: It is not to be denied that there 
must be some wide difference between my faith and | 
other faith ; and mine is a certain brief experience, 
which surprised me in the highway or in the market, 
in some place, at some time, — whether in the body 
or out of the body, God knoweth, —and made me 
aware that I had played the fool with fools all this 
time, but that law existed for me and for all; that 
to me belonged trust, a child’s trust and obedience, 
and the worship of ideas, and I should never be 
fool more. Well, in the space of an hour probably, 
/I was let down from this height; I was at my old 
‘ tricks, the selfish member of a selfish society. My 
‘life is superficial, takes no root in the deep world ; 
I ask, When shall I die and be relieved of the re- 
sponsibility of seeing an Universe which I do not 
use? I wish to exchange this flash-of-lightning 
faith for continuous daylight, this fever-glow for a 
benign climate. 

These two states of thought diverge every mo 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 333 


ment, and stand in wild contrast. To him who 
looks at his life from these moments of illumination, 
it will seem that he skulks and plays a mean, shift- 
less and subaltern part in the world. That is to be 
done which he has not skill to do, or to be said 
which others can say better, and he lies by, or oc- 
eupies his hands with some plaything, until his hour 
comes again. Much of our reading, much of our) 
labor, seems mere waiting: it was not that we were, 
born for. Any other could do it as well or better. — 
So little skill enters into these works, so little de 
they mix with the divine life, that it really signifies 
little what we do, whether we turn a grindstone, or. 
ride, or run, or make fortunes, or govern the state. 
The worst feature of this double consciousness is, 
that the two lives, of the understanding and of the 
soul, which we lead, really show very little relation 
to each other; never meet and measure each other : 
one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other 
prevails then, all infinitude and paradise ; and, with 
the progress of life, the two discover no greater 
disposition to reconcile themselves. Yet, what is 
my faith? Whatam1? What but a thought of 
serenity and independence, an abode in the deep 
blue sky? Presently tle clouds shut down again ; 
yet we retain the belief that this petty web we 
weave will at last be overshot and reticulated with 
veins of the blue, and that the moments will char. 


834 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


acterize the days. Patience, then, is for us, is it 
not? Patience, and still patience. When we pass, 
as presently we shall, into some new infinitude, out 
of this Iceland of negations, it will please us to 
reflect that though we had few virtues or conso- 
lations, we bore with our indigence, nor once strove 
to repair it with hypocrisy or false heat of any 
kind. | 

But this class are not sufficiently characterized if 
we omit to add that they are lovers and worship- 
pers of Beauty. In the eternal trinity of Truth, 
Goodness, and Beauty, each in its perfection includ- 
ing the three, they prefer to make Beauty the sign 
and head. Something of the same taste is observ- 
able in all the moral movements of the time, in the 
religious and benevolent enterprises. They have a 
liberal, even an esthetic spirit. A reference to 
Beauty in action sounds to be sure a little hollow 
and ridiculous in the ears of the old church. In 
politics, it has often sufficed, when they treated of 
justice, 1f they kept the bounds of selfish calculation. 
If they granted restitution, it was prudence which 
granted it. But the justice which is now claimed 
for the black, and the pauper, and the drunkard, is 
for Beauty, —1is for a necessity to the soul of the 
agent, not of the beneficiary. I say this is the 
tendency, not yet the realization. Our virtue tot- 
ters and trips, does not yet walk firmly. Its repre- 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 835 


sentatives are austere; they preach and denounce; 
their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are still 
hable to that slight taint of burlesque which in our 
strange world attaches to the zealot. A saint 
should be as dear as the apple of the eye. Yet we 
are tempted to smile, and we flee from the working 
to the speculative reformer, to escape that same 
slight ridicule. Alas for these days of derision and 
criticism! We call the Beautiful the highest, be- 
cause it appears to us the golden mean, escaping 
the dowdiness of the good and the heartlessness of 
the true. They are lovers of nature also, and find 
an indemnity in the inviolable order of the world 
for the violated order and grace of man. 

There is, no doubt, a great deal of well-founded 
objection to be spoken or felt against the sayings 
and doings of this class, some of whose traits we 
have selected ; no doubt they will lay themselves 
open to criticism and to lampoons, and as ridiculous 
stories will be to be told of them as of any. There 
will be cant and pretension ; there will be subtilty 
and moonshine. These persons are of unequal 
strength, and do not all prosper. They complain 
that everything around them must be denied; and 
if feeble, it takes all their strength to deny, before 
they can begin to lead their own life. Grave se- 
niors insist on their respect to this institution and 
that usage; to an obsolete history; to some voca- 


336 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


tion, or college, or etiquette, or beneficiary, or 
charity, or morning or evening eall, which they re- 
sist as what does not concern them. But it costs 
such sleepless nights, alienations and misgivings, 
—they have so many moods about it; these old 
guardians never change their minds; they have 
but one mood on the subject, namely, that Antony 
is. very perverse, — that it is quite as much as An- 
tony can do to assert his rights, abstain from what 
he thinks foolish, and keep his temper. He can- 
not help the reaction of this injustice in his own 
mind. He is braced-up and stilted; all freedom 
and flowing genius, all sallies of wit and frolie na- 
ture are quite out of the question ; it is well if he 
can keep from lying, injustice, and suicide. This 
is no time for gaiety and grace. His strength and 
spirits are wasted in rejection. But the strong 
spirits overpower those around them without effort. 
Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood, 
quite withdraws them from all notice of these carp- 
ing critics; they surrender themselves with glad 
heart to the heavenly,guide, and only by implica- 
tion reject the clamorous nonsense of the hour. 
Grave seniors talk to the deaf,-— church and old 
book mumble and ritualize to an unheeding, preoc- 
cupied and advancing mind, and thus they by hap- 
piness of greater momentum lose no time, but take 
the right road at first. 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. gas 


But all these of whom I speak are not profi- 
cients; they are novices; they only show the road 
in which man should travel, when the soul has 
greater health and prowess. Yet let them feel the 
dignity of their charge, and deserve a larger power. 
Their heart is the ark in which the fire is concealed 
which shall burn in a broader and universal flame. 
Let them obey the Genius then most when his im- 
pulse is wildest ; then most when he seems to lead 
to uninhabitable deserts of thought and life; for 
the path which the hero travels alone is the high- 
way of health and benefit to mankind. What is 
the privilege and nobility of our nature but its per- | 
sistency, through its power to attach itself to what 
is permanent ? 

Society also has its duties in reference to this 
class, and must behold them with what charity it 
can. Possibly some benefit may yet accrue from’ 
them to the state. In our Mechanics’ Fair, there 
must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenters’ 
planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer 
instruments, —rain gauges, thermometers, and tel- 
escopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, 
and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer 
fire kept specially as gauges and meters of charac- 
ter ; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who note 
the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in 


the bystander. Perhaps too there might be room 
VOL. I. 22 


838 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 


for the exciters and monitors; collectors of the 
heavenly spark, with power to convey the electric- 
ity to others. Or, as the stormed-tossed vessel at 
sea speaks the frigate or ‘line packet’ to learn its 
longitude, so it may not be without its advantage 
that we should now and then encounter rare and 
gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual 
compass, and verify our bearings from superior 
chronometers. 

Amidst the downward tendency and proneness 
of things, when every voice is raised for a new 
road or another statute or a subscription of stock; 
for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry; for 
a new house or a larger business; for a political 
party, or the division of an estate ; — will you not 
tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, 
speaking for thoughts and principles not market- 
able or perishable? Soon these improvements and 
mechanical inventions will be superseded ; these 
modes of living lost out of memory; these cities 
rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new 
seats of trade, or the geologic changes : — all gone, 
like the shells which sprinkle the sea-beach with 
a white colony to-day, forever renewed to be for- 
ever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few 
hermits strove to proclaim by silence as well as by 
speech, not only by what they did, but by what 
they forebore to do, shall abide in beauty and 


THE TRANSCENDENTALIST. 339 


strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to in- 
vest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher en- 
dowed and happier mixed clay than ours, in fuller; 

J 


a 


union with the surrounding system. 


i sie ar aes ro wean pays 


neh 


wale be Pena si 





THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


A LECTURE READ BEFORE THE MERCANTILE LIBRARY AS80- 
CIATION, BOSTON, FEBRUARY 7, 1844. 






MAOHROM A anor dee * eon 


fn « 


Ahied? Bahia, plaka ie Bah a ii ¥. yr 








’ ‘ -" ; 
—_ om | 
: > ® x 
4° ‘ a 
led Seat os 
- a od 
~ A ; dh ¥ 
5 me 
4 7 
ey 
} . 
. = a 
A. 
* 4 e Ks 
> 
% 7 
F ‘ 4 % ea re - 
1 j ; 
; R : 
a i. i nl 
if ; : 
i 4 
vals, f 
i -~ Pig 
VP eee 
‘ 7 r iS 
; . uy ; is i. a , : a 
mt oY Vo» J a = 
nS i Pee 
¥ rs 
, ay "A , 
~< » : ‘ 
hime Gia” ‘ 


se j 





THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 





GENTLEMEN : 

It is remarkable that our people have their intel- 
lectual culture from one country and their duties 
from another. This false state of things is newly in 
a way to be corrected. America is beginning to as- 
sert herself to the senses and to the imagination of 
her children, and Europe is receding in the same 
degree. This their reaction on education gives a 
new importance to the internal improvements and 
to the politics of the country. Who has not been 
stimulated to reflection by the facilities now in pro- 
egress of construction for travel and the transporta- 
tion of goods in the United States ? 

This rage of road building is beneficent for 
America, where vast distance is so main a consid- 
eration in our domestic politics and trade, inas- 
much as the great political promise of the inven- 
tion is to hold the Union staunch, whose days 
seemed already numbered by the mere inconven- 
ience of transporting representatives, judges, and 
officers across such tedious distances of land and 


344 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


water. Not only is distance annihilated, but when, 
as now, the locomotive and the steamboat, like 
enormous shuttles, shoot every day across the thou- 
sand various threads of national descent and em- 
ployment and bind them fast in one web, an hourly 
assimilation goes forward, and there is no danger 
that local peculiarities and hostilities should be pre- 
served. 

1. But I hasten to speak of the utility of these 

/ improvements in creating an American sentiment. 
An unlooked for consequence of the railroad is the 
increased acquaintance it has given the American 
people with the boundless resources of their own 
soil. If this invention has reduced England toa 
third of its size, by bringing people so much nearer, 
in this country it has given a new celerity to time, 
or anticipated by fifty years the planting of tracts 
of land, the choice of water privileges, the working 
of mines, and other natural advantages. Railroad 

| iron is a magician’s rod, in its power to evoke the 
| sleeping energies of land and water. 

The railroad is but one arrow in our quiver, 
though it has great value as a sort of yard-stick 
and surveyor’s line. The bountiful continent is 
ours, state on state, and territory on territory, te 
the waves of the Pacific sea ; 


_ “Our garden is the immeasurable earth, 
The heaven’s blue pillars are Medea’s house.” 


o 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 345 


The task of surveying, planting, and building upon 
this immense tract requires an education and a 
sentiment commensurate thereto. A consciousness 
of this fact is beginning to take the place of the 
purely trading spirit and education which sprang 
up whilst all the population lived on the fringe of 
sea-coast. And even on the coast, prudent men 
have begun to see that every American should be 
educated with a view to the values of land. The 
arts of engineering and of architecture are studied ; 
scientific agriculture is an object of growing atten- 
tion ; the mineral riches are explored; limestone, 
coal, slate, and iron; and the value of timber-lands 
is enhanced. 

Columbus alleged as a reason for seeking a con- 


tinent in the West, that the harmony of nature re-_ 


quired a great tract of land in the western hemi- 
sphere, to balance the known extent of land in the 
eastern; and it now appears that we must estimate 
the native values of this broad region to redress the 
balance of our own judgments, and appreciate the 
advantages opened to the human race in this coun- 
try which is our fortunate home. The land is the 
appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantas- 
tic in our culture. The continent we inhabit is to 
be physic and food for our mind, as well as our 
body. The land, with its tranquilizing, sanative 
influences, is to repair the errors of a scholastic and 


J 


346 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


traditional education, and bring us into just rela- 
tions with men and things. 

The habit of living in the presence of these in- 
vitations of natural wealth is not inoperative ; and 
this habit, combined with the moral sentiment 
which, in the recent years, has interrogated every 
institution, usage, and law, has naturally given a 
strong direction to the wishes and aims of active 
young men, to withdraw from cities and cultivate 
the soil. This inclination has appeared in the most 
unlooked for quarters, in men supposed to be ab- 
sorbed in business, and in those connected with the 
liberal professions. And since the walks of trade 
were crowded, whilst that of agriculture cannot 
easily be, inasmuch as the farmer who is not wanted 
by others can yet grow his own bread, whilst the 
manufacturer or the trader, who is not wanted, can- 
not, — this seemed a happy tendency. For beside 
all the moral benefit which we may expect from the 
farmer’s profession, when a man enters it consid- 
erately ; this promised the conquering of the soil, 
plenty, and beyond this the adorning of the country 
with every advantage and ornament which labor, 
ingenuity, and affection for a man’s home, could 
suggest. | 

Meantime, with cheap land, and the pacific dis- 
position of the people, everything invites to the arts 
of agriculture, of gardening, and domestic archi- 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 347 


tecture. Public gardens, on the scale of such plan- 
tations in Europe and Asia, are now unknown to 
us. There is no feature of the old countries that 
strikes an American with more agreeable surprise 
than the beautiful gardens of Europe; such as the 
Boboli in Florence, the Villa Borghese in Rome, 
the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, the gardens at Munich 
and at Frankfort on the Main: works easily imi- 
tated here, and which might well make the land 
dear to the citizen, and inflame patriotism. It is 
the fine art which is left for us, now that sculpture, 
painting, and religious and civil architecture have 
become effete, and have passed into second child- 
hood. We have twenty degrees of latitude wherein 
_to choose a seat, and the new modes of travelling 
enlarge the opportunity of selection, by making it 
easy to cultivate very distant tracts and yet remain 
in strict intercourse with the centres of trade and. 
population. And the whole force of all the arts 
goes to facilitate the decoration of lands and dwell- 
ings. A garden has this advantage, that it makes 
it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden 
makes the face of the country of no account ; let 
that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made 
a beautiful abode worthy of man. If the land- 
scape is pleasing, the garden shows it, —if tame, 
it excludes it. A little grove, which any farmer) 
can find or cause to grow near his house, will in a 


348 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


few years make cataracts and chains of mountains 
(quite unnecessary to his scenery; and he is so con- 
tented with his alleys, woodlands, orchards and 
river, that Niagara, and the Notch of the White 
Hills, and Nantasket Beach, are superfluities. And 
yet the selection of a fit houselot has the same 
advantage over an indifferent one, as the selectiou 
to a given employment of a man who has a genius 
for that work. In the last case the culture of 
years will never make the most painstaking ap- 
prentice his equal: no more will gardening give 
the advantage of a happy site to a house in a hole 
or on a pinnacle. In America we have hitherto 
little to boast in this kind. The cities drain the 
country of the best part of its population: the 
flower of the youth, of both sexes, goes into the 
towns, and the country is cultivated by a so much 
inferior class. The land, — travel a whole day to- 
gether, — looks poverty-stricken, and the buildings 
/plain and poor. In Europe, where society has an 
[aristocratic structure, the land is full of men of the 
\best stock and the best culture, whose interest and 
‘pride it is to remain half the year on their estates, 
/and to fill them with every convenience and orna- 
ment. Of course these make model farms, and 
model architecture, and are a constant education to 
the eye of the surrounding population. [w hatever 
events in progress shall go to disgust men with 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 349 


cities and infuse into them the passion for country | 
life and country pleasures, will render a service to/ 
the whole face of this continent, and will further 
the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, | 
the bringing out by art the native but hidden’ 
graces of the landscape. | 

I look on such improvements also as directly 
tending to endear the land to the inhabitant. Any 
relation to the land, the habit of tilling it, or min- 
ing it, or even hunting on it, generates the feeling 
of patriotism. He who keeps shop on it, or he who 
merely uses it as a support to his desk‘and ledger, 
or to his manufactory, values it less. The vast 
majority of the people of this country live by the 
land, and carry its quality in their manners and 
opinions. We in the Atlantic states, by position, 
have been commercial, and have, as I said, imbibed 
easily an European culture. Luckily for us, now, 
that steam has narrowed the Atlantic to a strait, | 
the nervous, rocky West is intruding a new and | 
continental element into the national mind, and we) 
shall yet have an American genius. How much 
better when the whole land is a garden, and the 
people have grown up in the bowers of a paradise. 
Without looking then to those extraordinary social 
influences which are now acting in precisely this 
direction, but only at what is inevitably doing 
around us, I think we must regard the land as a 


350 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


commanding and increasing power on the citizen, 
the sanative and Americanizing influence, which 
promises to disclose new virtues for ages to come. 

2. In the second place, the uprise and culmina- 
tion of the new and anti-feudal power of Com- 
merce is the political fact of most significance to 
the American at this hour. 

We cannot look on the freedom of this country, 
in connexion with its youth, without a presentiment 
that here shall laws and institutions exist on some 
scale of proportion to the majesty of nature. To 
men legislating for the area betwixt the two oceans, 
betwixt the snows and the tropics, somewhat of the 
gravity of nature will infuse itself into the code. 
A heterogeneous population crowding on all ships 
from all corners of the world to the great gates of 
North America, namely Boston, New York, and 
New Orleans, and thence proceeding inward to the 
prairie and the mountains, and quickly contribut- 
ing their private thought to the public opinion, 
their toll to the treasury, and their vote to the elec- 
tion, it cannot be doubted that the legislation of 
this country should become more catholic and cos- 
mopolitan than that of any other. It seems so 
easy for America to inspire and express the most 
expansive and humane spirit; new-born, free, health- 
ful, strong, the land of the laborer, of the democrat, | 
ot the philanthropist, of the believer, of the saint, 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. oOL 


she should speak for the human race. It is the 1” 
country of the Future. From Washington, prover- 
bially ‘the city of magnificent distances,’ through 
all its cities, states, and territories, it is a country 
of beginnings, of projects, of designs, of expecta- 
tions. 

Gentlemen, there is a sublime and friendly Des- 
tiny by which the human race is guided, — the 
race never dying, the individual never spared, — 
to results affecting masses and ages. Men are nar- 
row and selfish, but the Genius or Destiny is not 
narrow, but beneficent. It is not discovered in 
their calculated and voluntary activity, but m what 
befalls, with or without their design. Only what\ 
is inevitable interests us, and it turns out that love | 
and good are inevitable, and in the course of ( 
things. That Genius has infused itself into nature. 
It indicates itself by a small excess of good, a small 
balance in brute facts always favorable to the side 
of reason. All the facts in any part of nature 
shall be tabulated and the results shall indicate 
the same security and benefit; so slight as to be 
hardly observable, and yet it is there. The sphere 
is flattened at the poles and swelled at the equa- 
tor ; a form flowing necessarily from the fluid state, 
yet the form, the mathematician assures us, re- 
quired to prevent the protuberances of the conti 
nent, or even of lesser mountains cast up at any 


852 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


time by earthquakes, from continually deranging 
the axis of the earth. The census of the popula- 
tion is found to keep an invariable equality in the 
sexes, with a trifling predominance in favor of the 
male, as if to counterbalance the necessarily in- 
creased exposure of male life in war, navigation, 
and other accidents. Remark the unceasing effort 
throughout nature at somewhat better than the ac- 
tual creatures: amelioration in nature, which alone 
permits and authorizes amelioration in mankind. 
The population of the world is a conditional popu- 
lation; these are not the best, but the best that 
could live in the existing state of soils, gases, ani- 
mals and morals: the best that could yet live ; 
| there shall be a better, please God. This Genius 
or Destiny is of the sternest administration, though 
rumors exist of its secret tenderness. It may be 
styled a cruel kindness, serving the whole even to 
the ruin of the member ; a terrible communist, re- 
serving all profits to the community, without divi- 
dend to individuals. Its law is, you shall have 
everything as a member, nothing to yourself. For 
Nature is the noblest engineer, yet uses a grinding 
economy, working up all that is wasted to-day into 
to-morrow’s creation ;—— not a superfluous grain of 
sand, for all the ostentation she makes of expense 
and public works. It is because Nature thus saves 
and uses, laboring for the general, that we poor 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 353 


particulars are so crushed and straitened, and find 
it so hard to live. She flung us out in her plenty, 
but we cannot shed a hair or a paring of a nail but 
instantly she snatches at the shred and appropriates | 
it to the general stock. Our condition is like that 
of the poor wolves: if one of the flock wound him- 
self or so much as limp, the rest eat him up incon- 
tinently. 

That serene Power interposes the check upon) 
the caprices and officiousness of our wills. Its 
charity is not our charity. One of its agents is 
our will, but that which expresses itself in our will 
is stronger than our will. We are very forward to 
help it, but it will not be accelerated. It resists 
our meddling, eleemosynary contrivances. We de- 
vise sumptuary and relief laws, but the principle 
of population is always reducing wages to the low- 
est pittance on which human life can be sustained. 
We legislate against forestalling and monopoly ; 
we would have a common granary for the poor ; — 
but the selfishness which hoards the corn for high 
prices is the preventive of famine ; and the law of 
self-preservation is surer policy than any legislation 
can be. We concoct eleemosynary systems, and) 
it turns out that our charity increases pauperism. \ 
We inflate our paper currency, we repair commerce } 
with unlimited credit, and are presently visited | 
with unlimited bankruptcy. 

VOL. I. 23 


854 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


It is easy to see that the existing generation are 
conspiring with a beneficence which in its working 
for coming generations, sacrifices the passing one ; 
which infatuates the most selfish men to act against 
their private interest for the public welfare. We 
build railroads, we know not for what or for whom ; 
but one thing is certain, that we who build will re- 
ceive the very smallest share of benefit. Benefit 
will accrue, they are essential to the country, but 
that will be felt not until we are no longer country- 
men. We do the like in all matters : — 

“‘Man’s heart the Almighty to the Future set 
By secret and inviolable springs.” 

We plant trees, we build stone houses, we redeem 
the waste, we make prospective laws, we found col- 
leges and hospitals, for remote generations. We 
\ should be mortified to learn that the little benefit 
we chanced in our own persons to receive was the 
‘utmost they would yield. 

The history of commerce is the record of this 
beneficent tendency. The patriarchal form of gov- 
ernment readily becomes despotic, as each person 
may see in his own family. Fathers wish to be 
fathers of the minds of their children, and behold 
with impatience a new character and way of think- 
ing presuming to show itself in their own son or 
daughter. This feeling, which all their love and 
pride in the powers of their children cannot sub. 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 355 


due, becomes petulance and tyranny when the head 
of the clan, the emperor of an empire, deals with 
the same difference of opinion in his subjects. 
Difference of opinion is the one crime which kings 
never forgive. An empire is an immense egotism. 


“Tam the State,” said the French Lonis. Wher _ 


a French ambassador mentioned to Paul of Russia 
that a man of consequence in St. Petersburg was 
interesting himself in some matter, the Czar inter- 
rupted him,— “ There is no man of consequence 
in this empire but he with whom [| am actually 
speaking ; and so long only as I am speaking tc ( 
him is he of any consequence.” And the Emperor _ 
Nicholas is reported to have said to his council, 
“The age is embarrassed with new opinions; rely 
on me gentlemen, I shall oppose an iron will to 
the progress of liberal opinions.” 

It is easy to see that this patriarchal or family 
management gets to be rather troublesome to all 
but the papa; the sceptre comes to be a crow-bar. | 
And this unpleasant egotism, Feudalism opposes 
and finally destroys. The king is compelled to call 
in the aid of his brothers and cousins. and remote 
relations, to help him keep his overgrown house in 
order; and this club of noblemen always come at 
last to have a will of their own; they combine to 
brave the sovereign, and call in the aid of the peo- 
ple. Each chief attaches as many followers as he 


856 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


can, by kindness, maintenance, and gifts; and as 
long as war lasts, the nobles, who must be soldiers, 
rule very well. But when peace comes, the nobles 
prove very whimsical and uncomfortable masters ; 
their frolics turn out to be insulting and degrading 
to the commoner. Feudalism grew to be a bandit 
and brigand. 
ete ls 8 Trade had begun to ude Trade, a 


as_ there is peace, ane as “long as_ there is peace. 
The luxury and necessity ‘of the noble fostered it, 
And as quickly as men go to foreign parts in ships — 
or caravans, a new order of things springs up ; new 
command takes place, new servants and new mas- 
ters. Their information, their wealth, their corre- 
spondence, have made them quite other men than 
left their native shore. They are nobles now, and 
by another patent than the king’s. Feudalism 
had been good, had broken the power of the kings, 
and had some good traits of its own; but it had 
grown mischievous, it was time for it to die, and as 
they say of dying people, all its faults came out. 
Trade was the strong man that broke it down and 
raised a new and unknown power in its place. It 
is a new agent in the world, and one of great func- 
tion ; it is a very intellectual force. This displaces 
physical strength and instals computation, combin- 
ation, information, science, in its room. It calls 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 357 


out all force of a certain kind that slumbered in 
the former dynasties. It is now in the midst of 
its career. Feudalism is not ended yet. Our gov- 
ernments still partake largely of that element. 
Trade goes to make the governments insignificant, 
and to bring every kind of faculty of every individ- 
ual that can in any manuer serve any person, ov 
sale. Instead of a huge Army and Navy and Ex- 
ecutive Departments, it converts Government into 
an Intelligence-Office, where every man may find 
what he wishes to buy, and expose what he has to 
sell; not only produce and manufactures, but art, 
skill, and intellectual and moral values. This is 
the good and this the evil of trade, that it would 
put everything into market; talent, beauty, virtue, 
and man himself. 

The philosopher and lover of man have much 
harm to say of trade; but the historian will see 
that trade was the principle of Liberty; that trade. 
planted America and destroyed Feudalism; that 
it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish, , 
_ slavery. We complain of its oppression of the 
poor, and of its building up a new aristocracy on 
the ruins of the aristocracy it destroyed. But the 
aristocracy of trade has no permanence, is not en- 
tailed, was the result of toil and talent, the result 
of merit of some kind, and is continually falling, 
like the waves of the sea, before new claims of the 


858 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


same sort. Trade is an instrument in the hands of 
that friendly Power which works for us in our own 
despite. We design it thus and thus; it turns out 
otherwise and far better. This beneficent tenden- 
cy, omnipotent without violence, exists and works. 
Every line of history inspires a confidence that we 
shall not go far wrong ; that things mend. ‘That is 
the moral of all we learn, that it warrants Hope, 
the prolific mother of reforms. Our part is plainly 
not to throw ourselves across the track, to block 
improvement and sit till we are stone, but to watch 
the uprise of successive mornings and to conspire 
with the new works of new days. Government has 
been a fossil; it should be a plant. I conceive that 
\the office of statute law should be to express and 
\not to impede the mind of mankind. New thoughts, 
new things. ‘Trade was one instrument, but Trade 
is also but for a time, and must give way to some- 
what broader and better, whose signs are already 
dawning in the sky. 

3. I pass to speak of the signs of that which is 
the sequel of trade. 

In consequence of the revolution in the state of 
society wrought by trade, Government in our times 
is beginning to wear a clumsy and cumbrous ap- 
pearance. We have already seen our way to 
shorter methods. The time is full .of good signs. 
Some of them shall ripen to fruit. All this bene 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 359 


ficent socialism is a friendly omen, and the swelling | 
cry of voices for the education of the people indi-( 
cates that Government has other offices than those | 
of banker and executioner. Witness the new move- 
ments in the civilized world, the Communism of 
Hrance, Germany, and Switzerland; the Trades’ 
Unions ; the English League against the Corn Laws; 
and the whole Jndustrial Statistics, so called. In 
Paris, the blouse, the badge of the operative, has 
begun to make its appearance in the saloons. Wit-) - 
ness too the spectacle of three Communities which 
have within a very short time sprung up within 8 
this Commonwealth, besides several others under- ~ 
taken by citizens of Massachusetts within the ter- 
ritory of other States. These proceeded from a 
variety of motives, from an impatience of many 
usages in common life, from a wish for greater free- 
dom than the manners and opinions of society per- 
mitted, but in great part from a feeling that the 
true offices of the State, the State had let fall to the 
ground; that in the scramble of parties for the 
public purse, the main duties of government were 
omitted,—the duty to instrucc the ignorant, to 
supply the poor with work and with good guidance. 
These communists preferred the agricultural life as 
the mest favorable condition for human culture ; 
but they thought that the farm, as we manage it, 
did not satisfy the right ambition of man. The 


360 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


farmer, after sacrificing pleasure, taste, freedom, 
thought, love, to his work, turns out often a bank. 
rupt, like the merchant. This result might well 
seemastounding. All this drudgery, from cock-crow- 


fing to starlight, for all these years, to end in mort- 
gages and the auctioneer’s flag, and removing from 


‘bad to worse. It is time to have the thing looked 


SNARE em stnn 


into, and with a sifting criticism ascertained who is 
the fool. It seemed a great deal worse, because the 
farmer is living in the same town with men who 
pretend to know exactly what he wants. On one 
side is agricultural chemistry, coolly exposing the 
nonsense of our spendthrift agriculture and ruin- 
ous expense of manures, and offering, by means of 
a teaspoonful of artificial guano, to turn a sandbank 
into corn; and on the other, the farmer, not only 
eager for the information, but with bad crops and 
in debt and bankruptcy, for want of it. Here are 
Etzlers and mechanical projectors, who, with the 
Fourierists, undoubtingly affirm that the smallest 
union would make every man rich ;—and, on the 
other side, a multitude of poor men and women 
seeking work, and who cannot find enough to pay 
their board. The science is confident, and surely 
the poverty is real. If any means could be found 


'/ to bring these two together ! 


This was one design of the projectors of the As- 
sociations which are now making their first feeble 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 361 


experiments. They were founded in love and in 
laber. They proposed, as you know, that all men 
should take a part in the manual toil, and proposed 
to amend the condition of men by substituting har- 
monious for hostile industry. It was a noble thought 
of Fourier, which gives a favorable idea of his sys- 
tem, to distinguish in his Phalanx a class as the 
Sacred Band, by whom whatever duties were dis- 
agreeable and likely to be omitted, were to be as- 
sumed. 

At least an economical success seemed certain for 
the enterprise, and that agricultural association 
must, sooner or later, fix the price of bread, and 
drive single farmers into association in self-defence ; 
as the great commercial and manufacturing com- 
panies had already done. The Community is. 
only the continuation of the same movement which | 
made the joint-stock companies for manufactures, — 
mining, insurance, banking, and so forth. It has \ 
turned out cheaper to make calico by companies ; | 
and it is proposed to plant corn and to bake bread’) 
by companies. ? Di J 

Undoubtedly, atria male el be trade 
by these first adventurers, which will draw ridicule 
on their schemes. I think for example that they 
exaggerate the importance of a favorite project of 
theirs, that of paying talent and labor at one rate, 
paying all sorts of service at one rate, say ten cents 


362 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


the hour. They have paid it so; but not an in- 
‘stant would a dime remain adime. In one hand 
it became an eagle as it fell, and in another hand a 
\copper cent. For the whole value of the dime is in 
/ knowing what to do with it. One man buys with 
| it a land-title of an Indian, and makes his posterity 
\ princes; or buys corn enough to feed the world ; 
or pen, ink, and paper, or a painter’s brush, by 
which he can communicate himself to the human 
race as if he were fire; and the other buys barley 
candy. Money is of no value; it cannot spend it- 
\self. All depends on the skill of the spender. 
Whether too the objection almost universally felt 
by such women in the community as were mothers, to 
an associate life, to a common table, and a common 
‘nursery, etc., setting a higher value on the private 
| family, with poverty, than on an association with 
wealth, will not prove insuperable, remains to be 
determined. 

But the Communities aimed at a higher success 
in securing to all their members an equal and 
thorough education. And on the whole one may 
say that aims so generous and so forced on them 
by the times, will not be relinquished, even if these at- 
tempts fail, but will be prosecuted until they succeed. 

This is the value of the Communities ; not what 
they have done, but the revolution which they in- 
flicate as on the way. Yes, Government must edu: 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 363 


eate the poor man. Look across the country from 
any hill-side around us and the landscape seems 
to crave Government. The actual differences of ‘| 
men must be acknowledged, and met with love and_ | 
wisdom. These rising grounds which command 
the champaign below, seem to ask for lords, true 
lords, / land-lords, who understand the land and its. 
uses and the applicabilities of men, and whose 
government would be what it should, namely me- 
diation between want and supply. How gladly 
would each citizen pay a commission for the sup- 
port and continuation of good guidance. None 
should be a governor who has not a talent for 
governing. Now many people have a native skill 
for carving out business for many hands; a genius 
for the disposition of affairs; and are never hap- 
pier than when difficult practical questions, which 
embarrass other men, are to be solved. All lies} 
in light before them; they are in their element. 
Could any means be contrived to appoint only 
these! There really seems a progress towards 
such a state of things in which this work shall be 
done by these natural workmen; and this, not cer- 
tainly through any increased discretion shown by 
the citizens at elections, but by the gradual con- 
tempt into which official government falls, and the 
increasing disposition of private adventurers to as- 
sume its fallen functions. Thus the national Post 


864 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


Office is likely to go into disuse before the private 
telegraph and the express companies. The cur- 
rency threatens to fall entirely into private hands. 
Justice is continually administered more and more 
by private reference, and not by litigation. We 
have feudal governments in a commercial age. It 
would be but an easy extension of our commercial 
system, to pay a private emperor a fee for services, 
as we pay an architect, an engineer, or a lawyer. 
If any man has a talent for righting wrong, for ad- 
ministering difficult affairs, for counselling poor 
farmers how to turn their estates to good husband- 
‘ry, for combining a hundred private enterprises 
‘to a general benefit, let him in the county-town, or 
in Court Street, put up his sign-board, Mr. Smith, 
Governor, Mr. Johnson, Working king. 

How can our young men complain of the pov- 
erty of things in New England, and not feel that 
poverty as a demand on their charity to make New 
England rich? Where is he who seeing a thou- 
sand men useless and unhappy, and making the 
whole region forlorn by their inaction, and con- 
scious himself of possessing the faculty they want, 
does not hear his call to go and be their king ? 

We must have kings, and we must have nobles. 
{Nature provides such in every society, — only let 
‘us have the real instead of the titular. Let us 
have our leading and our inspiration from the best. 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 365 


In every society some_men are _bornto_rule.and— 
some to advise. Let the powers be well directed, 
directed by love, and they would everywhere be 
greeted with joy and honor. The chief is the chief 
all the world over, only not his cap and his plume. 
It is only their dishke of the pretender, which: 
makes men sometimes unjust to the accomplished |. 
man. If society were transparent, the noble would 
everywhere be gladly received and accredited, and 
would not be asked for his day’s work, but would 
be felt as benefit, inasmuch as he was noble. That 
were his duty and stint,—to keep himself pure 
and purifying, the leaven of his nation. I think I 
see place and duties for a nobleman in every soci- ) 
ety ; but it is not to drink wine and ride in a fine) 
eoach, but to guide and adorn life for the multi-\ 
tude by forethought, by elegant studies, by perse-| 
verance, self-devotion, and the remembrance of the) 
humble old friend, by making his life secretly beau- 
tiful. 

I call upon you, young men, to obey your heart 
and be the nobility of this land. In every age of 
the world there has been a leading nation, one of 
amore generous sentiment, whose eminent citizens 
were willing to stand for the interests of general 
justice and humanity, at the risk of being called, 
by the men of the moment, chimerical and fantas- 
tic. Which should be that nation but these States? 


< 


866 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


Which should lead that movement, if not New Eng- 
land? Who should lead the leaders, but the Young 
American? ‘The people, and the world, are now 
suffering from the want of religion and honor in 
its public mind. In America, out-of-doors all 
seems a market; in-doors an air-tight stove of con- 
ventionalism. Every body who comes into our 
houses savors of these habits; the men, of the mar- 
ket; the women, of the custom. I find no expres- 
sion in our state papers or legislative debate, in our 
lyceums or churches, especially in our newspapers, 
of a high national feeling, no lofty counsels that 
rightfully stir the blood. I speak of those organs 
which can be presumed to speak a popular sense. 
They recommend conventional virtues, whatever 
will earn and preserve property; always the capi- 
talist; the college, the church, the hospital, the 
theatre, the hotel, the road, the ship, of the capital- 
ist, — whatever goes to secure, adorn, enlarge these 
is good; what jeopardizes any of these is damna- 
ble. The ‘ opposition’ papers, so called, are on the 
same side. They attack the great capitalist, but 
with the aim to make a capitalist of the poor man. 
The opposition is against those who have money, 
from those who wish to have money. But who an- 
nounces to us in journal, or in pulpit, or in the 
street, the secret of heroism ? 


“‘ Man alone 
Can perform the impossible.” 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. B67 - 


I shall not need to go into an enumeration of 
our national defects and vices which require this 
Order of Censors in the State. I might not set 
down our most proclaimed offences as the worst. 
It is not often the worst trait that occasions the 
loudest outery. Men complain of their suffering, 
and not of the crime. I fear little from the bad 
effect of Repudiation; I do not fear that it will 
spread. Stealing is a suicidal business; you can- 
not repudiate but once. But the bold face and 
tardy repentance permitted to this local mischief 
reveal a public mind so preoccupied with the love 
of gain that the common sentiment of indignation 
at fraud does not act with its natural force. The 
more need of a withdrawal from the crowd, and a 
resort to the fountain of right, by the brave. The 
timidity of our public opinion is our disease, or, 
shall I say, the publicness of opinion, the absence 
_ of private opinion. Good nature is plentiful, but we 
want justice, with heart of steel, to fight down the 
proud. The private mind has the access to the to- 
tality of goodness and truth that it may be a bal- 
ance to a corrupt society ; and to stand for the pri- 
vate verdict against popular clamor is the office of 
the noble. If a humane measure is propounded in 
behalf of the slave, or of the Irishman, or the 
Catholic, or for the succor of the poor ; that senti- 
ment, that project, will have the homage of the 


368 THE YOUNG. AMERICAN. 


hero. That is his nobility, his oath of knighthood, 
to succor the helpless and oppressed ; always to 
throw himself on the side of weakness, of youth, of 
hope; on the liberal, on the expansive side, never 
on the defensive, the conserving, the timorous, the 
lock-and-bolt system. More than our good-will we 
may not be able to give. We have our own affairs, 
our own genius, which chains each to his proper 
work. We cannot give our life to the cause of the 
‘debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as another is 
(doing ; but to one thing we are bound, not to blas- 
'pheme the sentiment and the work of that man, not 
to throw stumbling blocks in the way of the aboli- 
‘tionist, the philanthropist; as the organs of influence 
‘and opinion are swift to do. It is for us to confide 
in the beneficent Supreme Power, and not to rely 
on our money, and on the state because it is the 
guard of money. At this moment, the terror of old 
people and of vicious people is lest the Union of 
these states be destroyed: as if the Union had any 
other real basis than the good pleasure of a major- 
ity of the citizens to be united. But the wise and 
just man will always feel that he stands on his own 
feet; that he imparts strength to the State, not re- 
ceives security from it; and that if all went down, 
he and such as he would quite easily combine in a 
new and better constitution. Every great and 
memorable community has consisted of formidable 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 369 


individuals, who, like the Roman or the Spartan, 
Tent his own spirit to the State and made it great. 
Yet only by the supernatural is a man strong; noth- 
ing is so weak as an egotist. Nothing is mightier ) 
than we, when we are vehicles of a truth before ( 
which the State and the individual are alike ephem- | 
eral. 

Gentlemen, the development of our American 
internal resources, the extension to the utmost of 
the commercial system, and the appearance of new 
moral causes which are to modify the State, are 
giving an aspect of greatness to the Future, which 
the imagination fears to open. One thing is plain 
for all men of common sense and common con- 
science, that here, here in America, is the home of 
man. After all the deductions which are to be 
made for our pitiful politics, which stake every 
gravest national question on the silly die whether 
James or whether Robert shall sit in the chair and 
hold the purse ; after all the deduction is made for 
our frivolities and insanities, there still remains an 
organic simplicity and liberty, which, when it loses 
its balance, redresses itself presently, which offers 
opportunity to the human mind not known in any 
other region. 

It is true, the public mind wants self-respect. 
We are full of vanity,-of which the most signal 


proof is our sensitiveness to foreign and especially 
VOL. I. 24 


370 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


English censure. One cause of this is our immense 
reading, and that reading chiefly confined to the 
[productions of the English press. It is also true 
that to imaginative persons in this country. there 
is somewhat bare and bald in our short history and 
unsettled wilderness. They ask, who would live 
in a new country that can live in an old? and it is 
not strange that our youths and maidens should 
burn to see the picturesque extremes of an anti- 
quated country. But it is one thing to visit. the 
peas and another_to. wish_ to. live. ‘there. 
( Would they like tithes to the clergy, and sevenths 
) to the government, and Horse-Guards, and licensed 
} press, and grief when a child is born, and threaten- 
\ ing, starved weavers, and a pauperism now consti- 
| tuting one thirteenth of the population? Instead 
of the open future expanding here before the eye 
of every boy to vastness, would they like‘ the clos- 
ing in of the future to a narrow slit of sky, and 
that fast contracting to be no future? One thing 
for instance, the beauties of aristocracy, we com- 
mend to the study of the travelling American. 
The English, the most conservative people this side 
of India, are not sensible of the restraint, but an 
American would seriously resent it. The aristoc- 
racy, incorporated by law and education, degrades 
life for the unprivileged classes. It is a question- 
able compensation to the embittered feeling of a 


THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 371 


proud commoner, the reflection that a fop, who, by 
the magic of title, paralyzes his arm and plucks 
from him half the graces and rights of a man, is 
himself also an aspirant excluded with the same 
ruthlessness from higher circles, since there is no 
end to the wheels within wheels of this spiral hea- 
ven. Something may be pardoned to the spirit of 
loyalty when it becomes fantastic; and something 
to the imagination, for the baldest life is symbolic. 
Philip I. of Spain rated his ambassador for neg- 
lecting serious affairs in Italy, whilst he debated 
some point of honor with the French ambassador ; 
“You have left a business of importance for a cer- 
emony.” The ambassador replied, ‘“ Your Maj- 
esty’s self is but a ceremony.” In the East, where 
the religious sentiment comes in to the support of 
the aristocracy, and in the Romish church also, 
there is a grain of sweetness in the tyranny ; but 
in England, the fact seems to me intolerable, what 
is commonly affirmed, that such is the transcendent 
honor accorded to wealth and birth, that no man 
of letters, be his eminence what it may, is received 
into the best society, except as a lion and a show. 
_ The English have many virtues, many advantages, 
and the proudest history of the world; but they 
need all and more than all the resources of the 
past to indemnify a heroic gentleman in that coun- 
try for the mortifications prepared for him by the 


372 THE YOUNG AMERICAN. 


system of society, and which seem to impose the 
alternative to resist or to avoid it. That there are 
mitigations and practical alleviations to this rigor, 
is not an excuse for the rule. Commanding worth 
and personal power must sit crowned in all compa- 
nies, nor will extraordinary persons be slighted or 
affronted in any company of civilized men. But 
the system is an invasion of the sentiment of jus. 
tice and the native rights of men, which, however. 
decorated, must lessen the value of English citizen- 
ship. It is for Englishmen to consider, not for us; 
we only say, Let us live in America, too thankful 
for our want of feudal institutions. Our houses 
and towns are like mosses and lichens, so slight 
and new; but youth is a fault of which we shall 
daily mend. This land too is as old as the Flood, 
and wants no ornament or privilege which nature 
could bestow. Here stars, here woods, here hills, 
here animals, here men abound, and the vast ten- 
dencies concur of a new order. If only the men 
are employed in conspiring with the designs of the 
Spirit who led us hither and is leading us still, we 
shall quickly enough advance out of all hearing of © 
others’ censures, out of all regrets of our own, into 
a new and more excellent social state than history 
has recorded. 


VA 8 \ ¥ 
arty og ie ay Ae) 


i 
A ea AH 


‘ » ey 
Po ak 





ow ae ea isk 
HULA) tie fain ial al 


my 
hy 











G 
4 


i 
i 


ae 

eT ; 
Wig) 

iid 

Niels :,* 

ry * 
Vs 

:% 





UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS-URBANA 


| | 


3 0112 004036676 





